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Hewitt, Arthur Wentworth, 


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Steeples among the hills 





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Steeples Among 
the Hills 


by / 
ARTHUR WENTWORTH ‘HEWITT 


Chairman of Vermont State Board of Education 
and for eighteen years pastor at 
Plainfield and Adamant. 





THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 


Copyright, 1926, by 
ARTHUR WENTWORTH HEWITI 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, 
including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 


To 
HON. REDFIELD PROCTOR, LL.D., 


MY PAL OF A THOUSAND PARASANGS OF 
RURAL ROAD, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK, 
HOWEVER UNWORTHY TO DO HONOR TO 
THE NOBLEST OF GOVERNORS AND THE 
KINDEST OF FRIENDS 


‘ gt 
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Bie y 
te “a 
OrEAe 
: i 





CONTENTS 
PART I 


“Wuy Do You Stray In PLAINFIELD?”’.. 
BEE wWADHTH (Mi he ee 
One WEEK IN SEPTEMBER............. 
THe TurrtTeentH Lasor oF HEerRcuuzs. 
DESPISED AND Reyectep or Mrn...... 


PART IU 


QuIzzING THE Country Pastor........ 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/steeplesamonghil0Ohewi 


PART I 
STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 





“WHY DO YOU STAY IN PLAINFIELD?” 


Like moonrise on a hilltop when fog is in 
the valley, the thought rose within me that 
if ever I published a book on the rural pas- 
torate, I could give it no better preface than 
to stand in the presence of God and answer 
honestly a question which has been asked of 
me a thousand times. On the very next day 
I opened my mail and read a letter accepting 
this book for publication. From such coinci- 
dence I infer the will of God. 

To tell why I have remained, now in the 
eighteenth year in the rural parish to which 
I was appointed when I joined the Vermont 
Conference on trial, is not easy, for the mo- 
tives are many and conflicting, but I am going 
to tell you, straight and true. 

The worst first. The only motive which is 
weak in its influence upon me, the only one of 
which I am ashamed, is that I am too lazy to 
move. When the tides of energy run low and 
I wander from room to room of my library 
and think of packing all those books—no, 
thank you! Not to mention this would not be 
honest. To give it more than mention would 
not be true. 

9 


10 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Now for deeper realities. Woodrow Wilson 
once said, “There is such a thing as a nation 
being too proud to fight.” Perhaps so, though 
evidence lacketh. But I am very sure there 
is such a thing as a minister who is too proud 
to move. When I became a probationer I 
was given this rural parish. Dismiss, please, 
the customary nonsense about a larger field. 
There is here more need than I can meet, more 
service than the ablest minister in our church 
could perform; and my people and I are happy 
in each other’s love. So long as these things 
are true, the burden of proof is not upon me 
to tell why I stay; it is upon you to tell why I 
should change. That moving is the custom 
means nothing to me, for the custom is rooted 
in a fundamental lack of vision. 

The appointments are read. A bright young 
man goes away from a church in which he 
has not stayed long enough to establish the 
intimacy necessary for real service. He may 
perhaps have been there only five years. The 
church was in the midst of a field which would 
have taxed his powers for a lifetime. Now 
he is appointed to a church which is consid- 
ered a “promotion.” His friends gather around 
him and congratulate him on his success, while 
I sit apart and fight my sense of burning shame 
at one more failure. Once more the conven- 


“WHY STAY IN PLAINFIELD?” 11 


tionalities of the superficial profession, once 
more the easy road, once more the eyes blind 
to the vision of a mighty man building the 
kingdom of God in the unwanted place; once 
more the humiliation of having a man in the 
calling who considers that he can be either 
promoted or demoted. 

In the rugged days of the pioneers it would 
have been an honor to ride from place to place 
on trails like those of Francis Asbury, but 
those days in this country are gone, and how 
ministers now can move at brief intervals 
from one parish to another and not feel shame 
at the indignity of it, I cannot understand. 
Those two old green volumes of Wentworth 
Genealogy yonder tell me that my ancestors, 
in one line, have been country gentlemen 
since before the Norman Conquest. Of their 
race were knights, barons, earls, lord high 
chancellors, colonial governors, and the mother 
of a king. From generation to generation they 
kept their castles and served their monarch. 
Their blood is in me. I too am a country 
gentleman, and I serve my'King. My castle 
is only an old brick manse, but there is not a 
ripple either of humor or of play in the state- 
ment that I hold it profoundly beneath my 
dignity as a gentleman to knock about from 
parish to parish. The very thought of being 


12 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


a ministerial jumping-jack fills me with shame. 
I can leave Plainfield when it is best, but at 
any sign of frequent moves I should lay aside 
my ministry for one in which I could main- 
tain my self-respect. I am not judging others. 
I am telling motives which are vital in me. I 
cannot understand where is the pride of that 
man who feels no humiliation at the uncon- 
scious insult in those compliments which infer 
that any particular appointment could be an 
honor to him, rather that he to zw. Tt any 
place can confer dignity upon him, where is 
the inherent dignity of his personality? It is 
worldly, it is vain, but I am telling the truth. 
IT have been a Wentworth for nine centuries, 
and I am ashamed to stoop to the petty pro- 
motions which are in vogue. 

Other motives are potent too. I honor and 
envy those who are priests and nothing else. 
But I can never so confine my life. By na- 
ture and heritage I am a man among men 
and I value my citizenship. No moving min- 
ister has any real citizenship, least of all if 
he is a city minister. Of course he votes. Of 
course he has some transient civic influence on 
his congregation. Occasionally he may make 
a splurge in some city election. All that is 
local and ephemeral. But the pastor who has 
a home and is rooted in the countryside may 


Ea 


“WHY STAY IN PLAINFIELD?” 13 


become a strong and abiding influence in the 
government of his State, with all the rich 
friendships which accompany the privilege. 
For ten years Vermont has had no senator 
or representative in Congress, no justice of the 
supreme court, no judge of the superior courts, 
no State officer or leader in Legislature with 
whom I have not been on terms of more or 
less familiar personal acquaintance. For ten 
years the State has had no governor who has 
not either been to my home, or invited me to 
the executive chamber, to take counsel with 
him on some matter of state. These friend- 
ships have enriched my life and my ministry, 
and I have loved my citizenship as a Ver- 
monter along with my duty as a pastor. Such 
things have not depended on my residence in 
Plainfield, but they have come about because 
I was a long-time resident in one community 
which was rural. Nor are these things peculiar 
to me. They will gravitate toward any man 
of similar tastes and equal equipment (meager 
enough, alas!) who will be a citizen long enough 
for them to gather around him. It would not be 
honest, I suppose, not to confess that this State- 
wide contact with men and affairs is one of the 
factors which would make it seem such a:narrow- 
ing of life to leave Plainfield for a city pastorate. 

For I am intimately familiar with several 


a 


14 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


important city pastorates. Such would not 
want to excuse me from the committee errands 
which I despise, so trivial in comparison with 
the prophetic office of a free soul! Such a 
freedom I might achieve by main strength 
even there; but why go forth with sweat and 
blood for that which comes with open arms 
to my door in greener places? After liberty 
freely conferred by a kind parish to preach 
the word and to be shepherd of my flock in 
my own way; after such acquaintance with 
each other that I may so order my time as to 
read and write what I will; after freedom to 
travel, to be upon the platform, to move 
among legislators, it would be insufferable to 
be confined to the errand-boy organization of 
the machine known as the city church, to be 
trimmed like a hedge after branching like a 
tree. There are things which I want to study 
for years at a stretch; there are things which 
I am foreordained to write and speak, and I 
shall not leave my green Bethany of long 
thoughts. Here in the hills are life and lib- 
erty. Not that there is less work than in the 
city, but that it may be done in ways more 
direct and elemental, without the clatter of 
wheels in confusion. 

Some of these reasons are selfish, some are 
frankly worldly, but I am trying to put them 


“WHY STAY IN PLAINFIELD?” 15 


in the reverse order of their importance. The 
foregoing, forget. Come nearer the cross. 

However otherwise the foregoing may sound, 
my hours are mostly spent as shepherd of 
souls. I hope to be a minister of Jesus Christ 
while I live. Pastors are knights of God, 
serving him in a far country. As no pastor- 
ate or bishopric is great enough to exalt them, 
so neither is any post hard nor obscure enough 
to degrade them. Our duty is where we can 
serve best, and I was appointed here. Many 
of the calls I have rejected might have in- 
creased my salary or my reputation, but so 
long as the work here is beyond my powers 
none could have increased my service to God. 
Whatever my little segment of a world might 
have thought of a move which all its habits 
would lead it to believe successful, if for any 
other reason than for the glory of God I had 
abandoned the patient beginnings of the long 
years, only to make them over again in some 
other place, I should know it in my heart 
for apostasy and failure. When a great business 
lays in one city the foundations of its develop- 
ment it does not pull up stakes and go to 
another. . When a physician has just built 
public confidence in a community he does not 
abandon it for a new venture. Why should I 
be so much more foolish than they? 


16 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Another motive which keeps me in a hum- 
ble rural charge is the thought of my breth- 
ren. Hf there is any curse upon the work of 
God, it is that restless fashion of considering 
that to succeed is to get out of the rural into 
the urban pastorate, the unwillingness to serve 
a country parish longer than is imperative, 
and the consequent caste and grading of men. 
I am betting my whole professional life that 
this thing 1s wrong. Worldly reasons are obvi- 
ous why no pastor moves from a so-called 
“leading church” into a great pagan rural 
community, but is there any spiritual reason 
why the thing should not be done without 
loss of caste? Ten thousand of my brother 
pastors will be in humble rural churches as 
long as they live; many of them because they 
are too consecrated to leave, more because no 
other appointments are open to them. Why 
should they suffer the heartache and dishonor 
of professional discrimination because they are 
rural? No, don’t say it! That pious answer 
has been made until it is stale, but the dis- 
crimination is there just the same. 

Well, I am not yet man enough to be encour- 
agement to anybody; but if such a day should 
come, it will find me standing with those men. 
If I could be the mightiest man in the church, 
all the more should I stand with the least and 


“WHY STAY IN PLAINFIELD?” 17 


the humblest, helping them to take heart in 
the great crusade. Not an ounce of self- 
sacrifice will be in the process, for I believe 
that the country is the place of greater joy, 
greater opportunity, and even greater honor, 
as soon as we have self-reliance enough to 
laugh in the face of our own profession, or to 
forget it. 

These are some of the motives which have 
kept me in a country parish. But when I 
speak in particular of Plainfield and Adamant, 
the simple reason is that this is home. These 
people are my people, and I have learned to 
love them so that if I should leave them I 
should dream of them by night and miss them 
by day until the end of the chapter. Their 
patience, their loyalty, their lovingkindness are 
beyond all words and have never failed me. 
I wanted to make this chapter vivid with 
special instances, but I must not. None of 
these friends must see the kindnesses of others 
recorded while their own is omitted; and if I 
wrote them all, nothing else could find place 
in the book. I have moved much among men. 
I know many communities, rural and urban, 
and I have found no other people among 
whom I should be so happy to live. I have 
shared their joys, and I have buried their 
dead. I have baptized their children ; they 


18 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS — 


have grown up; I have given them in mar- 
riage, and have baptized the children of these 
in turn, until I can never take root so deeply 
again in any other affections. 

And this parsonage on the curving street 
high above the Winooski River? The old 
brick manse is banked with shrubbery which 
we have set, and there are tall maples along 
the walk which were planted by our hands. 
My wife has filled the house with pictures of © 
her making, and I have filled it with books by 
painful purchase. These might be moved. 
But God has filled it with memories of things 
which can never happen to us again Im any 
other house. Here in our youth a few months 
after marriage we made our home, poor, wholly 
unknown, and beginning the Conference course 
of study, which we read together. Here father 
and mother used to come for long visits— 
where mother now comes alone. Here baby 
Hilda came and went. Here are memories of 
happy friends who will never visit us any 
more, of glad little folks now grown into jaded 
maturity. Here my little sister used to come 
—to-night in the next room two of her four 
daughters are sleeping and one of them is the 
image of what she herself used to be. All 
things end—but when we leave the old brick 
manse that day will mark the division between 


“WHY STAY IN PLAINFIELD?” 19 


youth and age. It will be a heartbreaking 
thing to leave to another captain the old ship. 
which carries the whole cargo of our most 
sacred memories. 

Only one thing could then be my solace. 
It would be to build me a manse above River- 
ton, high on Sunset Hill overlooking the main 
peaks of the Green Mountains, and to give 
the rest of my days to the scattered parish of 
my own boyhood, more rural and remote than 
this. 

By this time you know that this book will 
be intimate and personal in method. I do 
not always like it so. Some parts of this very 
chapter seem insufferably vain and conceited. 
There are two ways to write a book on the 
country church. One is to do it abstractly 
from a well-organized outline. I commend 
this method to my city brethren who write 
on rural themes—I shall never use it. The 
other method is that of the forthright human 
document which must be largely autobio- 
graphic. The former is the method of sys- 
tematic theology; the latter of the Scriptures, 
the truth being the same in both. This theme 
is too throbbing for me to care to do other 
than to speak out of experience as I am moved 
by the Holy Spirit. I cannot stop to organ- 
ize the message in logical outline. I only give 


20 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


you these hints. If any references seem incon- 
sistent, remember that the articles have been 
produced by spontaneous impulse at various 
times during the last twelve years. 

The explanation of the Quiz—Part II of 
the book—is as follows: In April eighteen 
years ago Bishop Earl Cranston stood behind 
the pulpit of the Hedding Methodist Episcopal 
Church in Barre, Vermont, reading the appoint- 
ments. It was a cloudy Sunday afternoon. 
Suddenly a stream of sunlight fell on the 
Bishop’s face as he read, “Plainfield, Arthur 
W. Hewitt.” Plainfield was considered a very 
humble, hard, typical rural charge, but the 
years have never belied that promise out of 
the sky. 

Living all my days in the open country, I 
never knew there was such a thing as “the 
rural problem” until letters from ocean to 
ocean told me how helpfully I had written 
upon it in the Methodist Review. Soon after- 
ward my thoughts upon rural themes were 
called into still more vigorous circulation. 
For two years I was asked to give courses of 
lectures at the Silver Bay Conferences of 
country workers. Next I addressed the Coun- 
try Life Conference of the New England and 
Middle Atlantic States in New York city. 
Since that November day in 1916 I have 


“WHY STAY IN PLAINFIELD?” 9} 


been busy with lectures on rural life and 
church. Some have been given at great camp 
meetings, some at “Community-efficiency” con- 
ferences held in capital cities at the time of 
‘Legislature, and some at Annual Conferences 
of clergymen; but most have been given in 
colleges and theological seminaries. Before the 
first year was over I had lectured in Hartford 
Theological Seminary, The Berkeley Divinity 
School, Union Theological Seminary, Drew 
Theological Seminary, Boston University School 
of Theology and Pennsylvania State College. 
This book is composed mostly of the ma- 
terial of these lectures. Wishing, however, not 
only to present my own view of the rural 
pastorate, but to know the questions which 
trouble the minds of others, I solicited and 
recorded after each lecture the objections and 
questions which rise in the thoughts of the 
theological students of this country when they 
consider whether to enter the rural pastorate. 
These questions are not many, but are recur- 
ring and insistent. They are not always those 
which I should have expected. I think I could 
add some which are more interesting than any 
which are here, but I am giving the list faith- 
fully as it came to me, adding none, and omit- 
ting only two classes, namely: (1) those which 
might have been personal, such as questions 


22 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


concerning the relation of a pastor to legis- 
lature and executive state office; and (2) ques- 
tions on which I have already written at 
length, such as “What qualifications are nec- 
essary to success in the rural pastorate?” 
which I have answered in “Knights of a Far 
Country,” and “The Picture of Pastor X,” 
two articles found in this book. 

Some of the answers which follow are taken 
in part from stenographic records of the occa- 
sion, but mostly they are compiled from 
answers given on several occasions to the 
same recurring question. 


*“* “The time has come,’ the Walrus said, 
“To talk of many things: 
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— 
Of cabbages—and kings— 
And why the sea is boiling hot— 
And whether pigs have wings.’ ” 


“HE LEADETH ME” 


Tue November twilight was darkening in 
the ward of the Deaconess Hospital. In one 
commer was a man whose terrifying symptoms 
no physician could diagnose. Beside him was 
one who must go under the knife in the morn- 
ing, At my left was a man who had tried 
Kiddyism and was still unhealed. Diagonally 
across from the foot of my bed was a broken 
old man whose physical pain was shadowed 
by the hallucination that he was accused of 
murder. Every man of us was in the deepest 
gloom. I never had been in a hospital bed 
before. What malignant thing might be maim- 
ing me I knew not yet. The night was dark 
and I was far from home. Suddenly a piano 
chord, a hush, then a jubilant full chorus from 
the place where the corridors cross. The 
nurses had gathered for evensong, and they 
sang the favorite hymn of my mother: 

“He leadeth me! O blessed thought! 
O words with heavenly comfort fraught! 
Whate’er I do, where’er I be, 
Still *tis God’s hand that leadeth me.” 

On those voices God had come. Conviction 
came that the song was true, and this chapter, 

23 


24 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


written ‘‘with eye single to the glory of God,” 
is a testimony that “He leadeth me.” As one 
sits with his dearest friends by the inglenook 
and speaks unashamed of intimate things, so 
I now speak to my brothers in the rural pas- 
torate. If anyone sees unbecoming egotism in 
this personal manner, let him know at once 
that he is an intruder for whom these con- 
fidences were not intended. 

But always, in every college and theological 
seminary where I have lectured, one question 
has recurred. No one asks it in a public dis- 
cussion or in class. In confidential nooks of 
the shady campus or in students’ rooms on 
the top floor of the dormitory it always comes, 
the only supreme question. Granted the great- 
ness of the crusade and all the fine things we 
say of the rural ministry, can a man of high 
hopes devote his life to it and in his heart of 
hearts be satisfied? “Out of your experience, 
out of your heart, what is the truth before 
God? Will you tell us?” Yes, I will. 


“T was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou 
Shouldst lead me on.” 


Before I was seventeen years old I was 
licensed to preach, and I have been pastor 
since I was eighteen. In all those years of 
youth I shared with my mates the conven- 


“HE LEADETH ME” 25 


tional notions of ministerial success. All roads, 
mine as well as theirs, were to lead to Rome. 
I loved the country, I was bored by the city, 
but it never once occurred to me that there 
could be any other success than urban. Some 
of my classmates, better schooled than I, 
soon had a choice of city churches while I was 
still in Plainfield, not so much because any- 
body wanted me here as because nobody 
wanted me elsewhere. In my imagination I 
saw the friends of my youth forgetting me on 
the shining hills of their success. Nobody in 
the whole ecclesiastical outfit took the least 
notice of me. District superintendents and 
others, well-meaning servants of God to whom 
he is welcome, had said the most discouraging 
things about the dullness of my preaching. 
It wasn’t fair, for I had listened to theirs and 
had kept the secret, but it hurt just the same. 
I sank to the depths of despair. 

When I hit the bottom it jolted my ances- 
tral pride awake. Wrath moved within me. 
What was the matter, anyway? Just as from 
the top of Agamenticus I once saw the sunset 
flash on the glass flower houses of Madbury, 
so the truth came to me in a flash of light. 
I, foreordained of God to have a message of 
my own, was bound like Lazarus by the opin- 
ions of lesser men until I could not move a 


26 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


hand. Why was I unhappy? Not because of 
my home; this old brick manse in the green 
paradise of the hills was just such as I de- © 
sired. Not because of my work; I had a wider 
field than I could reap. Not because of my 
people; they were just such as I loved. The 
only reason for my discontent was that I had 
blindly believed the notions of others in which 
I had grown up. I was crushed in spirit by 
the idiotic opinion of the profession that to 
stay in a country parish was undesirable. 
Realization was release. The opinions of folks 
who could think like that no longer inter- 
ested me. 

Was I dull in my preaching? Yes, God 
knoweth! But why? Because the prophet was 
afraid of the millmer. I don’t know what 
real instruction might have done for me. My 
father, in doubt whether to give me an edu- 
cation or to send me to Harvard, was too 
poor to do either, and in youth I was too 
frail. So I never had a day of college, never 
saw a college Commencement until given my 
Doctor’s degree, and never saw even the out- 
side of a theological seminary until I made a 
tour of seminaries as lecturer. But I did 
study. With all my heart I sought every 
hint I could get from homiletic books and 
every other source. Earnestly I tried to preach 


“HE LEADETH ME” 27 


as I was taught. Yet I was a dull failure, on 
the testimony of those who ought to know. 

Once more indignation shook me _ free. 
“Never again!” I said to myself. “Never 
again, so help me God! will I think or care how 
I speak. Forthright, I will say what I want 
to say in the way I want to say it. If it ends 
my ministry, praise God for the release! 
Never again will I care about the author- 
ities. I will myself be authority. The whole 
ecclesiastical outfit may go.” I felt like a man 
who wakes refreshed on the top of a mountain. 

Then I made a surprising discovery. I had 
always known that Aisop’s fox could not reach 
the high grapes, but there were two facts 
which I learned that sop had overlooked. 
One was that the fox was exactly right in 
judging the flavor of the fruit he couldn’t 
reach, and the other was that as soon as the 
poor animal turned away the clusters began 
to fall and pelt him on the head until he was 
tired of it. 

The grapes fell, of course. The authorities 
were so slow to cut off clusters that I used 
to be amused. On the way to Conference in 
1913, a district superintendent cautiously said 
to me, “If you had any thoughts of moving 
this year, I think possibly I could place you 
somewhere on my district.” I wanted to 


98 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


laugh and to say, “I think possibly you could, 
brother, for I have in my pocket now letters 
of invitation from the Quarterly Conferences 
of two of your largest churches.” But by 
that time I had lost all notion of leaving the 
rural parish. 

But I did not know that I was to face one 
more crisis. God selected for me the most 
decisive one on earth. Trinity Church in 
Montpelier may or may not be much of a 
church—it is so bound up with the memories, 
the imagination, and the affections of youth 
that I shall never be able to judge. I was 
brought up in a little congregation of forty 
people who never had any preaching but that 
of students—not theological, but preparatory 
school students. From their humble minis- 
tries I went to Montpelier to school and sud- 
denly found myself in Trinity Church, thrilled 
and captivated by the rapid eloquence of 
Charles O. Judkins. State House traditions 
had filled our home from childhood and 'Trimity 
was in our capital city. Senator Dillingham, 
boyhood friend of my father, was a member 
of the congregation. Montpelier Seminary was 
my father’s school and my own and that of 
all my former pastors, and its students attended 
Trinity Church. At the altars of that church 
before I was of age, I had been ordained dea- 


“HE LEADETH ME” 29 


con by Bishop Fowler on a day when he had 
delivered there the most tremendous oratory 
I ever heard, before or since. Every imag- 
ination of my youth glorified the place into 
cathedral-like proportions. And now I was 
offered the pastorate of Trinity Church! The 
superintendent of the Montpelier District urged 
me to accept. I took counsel of my own 
superintendent; he urged the same. So ad- 
vised my friends. I had settled to the country 
pastorate. Other churches would not have 
tempted me, but this was Trinity, and I could 
hear that deep-toned bell which had called 
worshipers to listen to their pastors in hon- 
ored line, Charles Parkhurst, Timothy Prescott 
Frost, Andrew Gillies. 

For an absent-minded week I kept the 
answer waiting. At Silver Bay, after my 
lectures, some letters came from Plainfield— 
letters from young people asking me not to 
leave them; letters from old people asking me 
to stay and comfort them while they lived 
and to bury them when they died. Then there 
was a petition signed by every official of the 
church promising their loyalty and my lib- 
erty, and asking me to stay with them indef- 
initely as their pastor. Then I knew my duty 
and my heart’s desire. I do not know whether 
I shall stay in Plainfield for a long pastorate 


30 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


or whether I shall leave at the end of the first 
twenty years; but I am glad my people did 
not let me go to Trinity Church. It was the 
last late battle of a war that had ended, like 
New Orleans after the Peace Treaty, but it 
did much for me. It confirmed me in the 
decisions of years before. It put me at 
brotherly ease with the now appreciative 
“powers that be,”’ and it called mto momentary 
power some passing regrets. 

For now we approach the reasons which 
this article has for being written. It is true 
that I have always loved the country more 
than the city. It is true that I no longer 
think it a sacrifice to devote myself to the 
country pastorate. But once I did not think 
like this. In the years when I was making that 
real decision which was given finality by the 
incident just told, I felt that in giving up all 
prospect of a city ministry I was givmg up 
three things which were supremely dear to me. 

I had all the impulses, if few of the gifts, 
of the orator, and I had a passion for the 
listening throngs. These might be in the city 
church, but how could they be in the rural? 
This essential part of myself I sacrificed with 
many pangs on the altars of God. 

Then I wanted a library—not the ordinary 
workshop affair, but such a collection of the 


“HE LEADETH ME” 31 


world’s literature in bindings worthy of it as 
I knew the meager salary of a rural pastor 
could never buy. 

One thing more. I wanted travel. The 
picture of Yosemite was in colors on the wall 
of my babyhood home. My father told me 
stories of Colorado. I wanted to see the won- 
ders of our great land, of Europe, of the Holy 
Land, and I knew that one tour alone would 
take more than twice over the whole annual 
salary which I was getting. Never mind. 
That, too, could go if God wished it. I felt 
deeply in my heart the duty of the rural min- 
istry and I | it, but these three dreams 
had to die, ard they gied with many pangs. ' 
I had yet to learn that a man cannot do God’s 
will and at the same time avoid his own heart’s 
desire. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God. . . 
all these shall be added unto you.” The man 
who will trust himself to God is inescapably 
predestined to be blessed far above all his own 
dreams. Your mercies may not be the same 
as mine, for he calleth his own sheep by name; 
but if you are consecrated, then surer than 
bloodhounds they will follow you down and 
find you. Be not deceived. God is not mocked. 

So I laid on the altar my desire to face the 
listening throngs. But hardly had I made the 
decision which sacrificed it when, because I 


82 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


had retained my citizenship in my rural parish, 
I was thrust into a position of leadership 
in the Legislature at the culmination of a 
generation of educational debate. I have tried 
to think it would_not be immodest to mention 
by way of illustration what was in all the 
Vermont editorials and headlines of ten years 
ago, but I will say only this: From those 
earliest days of battle and victory, the audi- 
ences which I thought I had sacrificed have 
come surging and insistent. Daily the letters 
of invitation break upon me like a surf, to 
recede in a swash of refusal. 

Where have I not spoken! Churches, insti- 
tutes, camp meetings, Conferences, of course. 
Everybody speaks at these. But in those other 
memories, what seas of faces! Legislatures 
with crowded galleries; great city halls and 
auditoriums; little chapels and class rooms of 
theological seminaries; college assembly rooms 
——once a concourse of students so large that 
I had to take them in relays on two succeeding 
hours. Speeches at Commencement over the 
ferns of the rural town hall or the footlights 
of the great city opera house; speeches at State 
Teachers’ Associations; State fraternal meet- 
ings; interstate religious, and sometimes polit- 
ical gatherings; speeches at social gatherings in 
fine mansions; speeches at banquets without 


“HE LEADETH ME” 33 


number, boards of trade, chambers of com- 
merce, State newspaper associations, State 
dairymen’s associations, State bankers’ asso- 
ciations, State grain dealers association: great 
open air meetings; hotels with palatial ban- 
quet halls at Narragansett; in Boston; in New 
York; in the West—oh weariness! I am sick 
of trying to write a list which I cannot even 
remember. What I mean by it is only this: 
I offered up Isaac, and God said “No.” The 
ram was ready in the bushes. By devoting 
myself to the country I thought I had given 
up hope of facing great audiences. I cannot 
now imagine any metropolitan church the pas- 
torate of which I would not refuse, and one 
of the first reasons of my refusal would be that 
to accept would actually diminish the numbers 
of those to whom I should speak in the course 
of a year. Not that in every year I always 
speak to more than do preachers in such 
churches, but that I usually do, and that 
certainly I always should if I accepted the 
Invitations which I receive. Neither do I 
imply that they do not receive such invita- 
tions, but that I am the more free. 

The library of which I had dreamed was 
laid on the altar when I decided to abide a 
rustic. I never show anyone into my library 
without a humble remembrance of Hezekiah 


34 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


showing his treasures to the Babylonians and 
a fear lest I be like that. But I hope it is not 
wrong to say for the glory of God that I have 
been allowed to gather into the ninety shelves 
of the Old Brick Manse a library which means 
so much to me that I would not exchange it 
for any library public or private inthe world. 
This does not necessarily mean that the books 
would sell for much—though I have had my 
wild times at Lauriat’s and Brentano’s. It 
does mean that my literary needs and desires 
are met somewhere among these cases which 
stand covered with colored stones which I 
have brought from the West, and overhung in 
one room by my wife’s paintings of castle and 
mountain and sea, and in another by Max- 
field Parrish’s best, and in another by copies 
from the masters which I brought home from 
Rome and Florence. 

For the third great sacrifice likewise failed 
of privation. I gave up the hope of travel. 
Then by the strangest train of events ever 
known to romance it happened that, because 
I had stayed in my rural parish, my dreams 
came true. This is not the place where I shall 
tell the story. The results are that castles 
in Spain are no more visionary to me, for I 
have walked in the Alhambra. I will not make 
account of little trips like going to Washington, 


y 


“HE LEADETH ME” 35 


delegated by the governor on business of state, 
or going to Des Moines for a General Confer- 
ence of the church. Trips of such value are 
minor and many—to me who lived on cold 
rye-meal rolls and wore the cast-off clothes of 


others when I was trying, sick and hungry, to 


go to school. I have pleasant memories of one 
springtime trip to the Rocky Mountains; and 
neither my lady nor I can ever forget that 
other summer at our ease—Niagara, the Great 
Lakes by Anchor Line from Buffalo to Duluth, 
the week in Yellowstone Park, the Rockies, 
Rainier and the Cascade Mountains with their 
mighty forests; Shasta, the Yosemite Valley, 
the Mariposa grove of Sequoias; yes, California 
from one end to the other, with leisure for its 
welcome luxuries; then Arizona with the mule- 
back ride down Bright Angel Trail into the 
bottom of the Grand Canyon—unforgettable 
things recalled now only to show that what a 
man thinks he has sacrificed for the glory of 
God he may have to take back for the pleasure 
of God. No, the end of my Odyssey is not 
yet told, but if a man may quote from himself 
and I may borrow from the Zion’s Herald of 
October 22, 1924, I will subjoin its history in 
such rime as will surely doom the chapter to 
its end. 


36 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 
HOME AGAIN 


Before the sphinx at moonlight 
A camel did I ride on, 

And in the burning noonlight 
I walked in ancient Sidon. 


It once was mine to have a 
Dim glimpse of Ida, later 
I trod the purple lava 
Of Old_Vesuvius’ crater. 


Ive sailed the Azure Grotto 
Of Capri, looked on Como; 
The bell-tower of Giotto 
I’ve seen beside the Duomo. 


I rivers, near and far, know. 

To see them thrilled each fiber: 
The Nile, the Po, the Arno, 

The Jordan, and the Tiber. 


I saw the old Alhambra 
By moonlight in Granada; 
I saw, but did not clamber, a 
White Sierra Nevada. 


The Temple of Zeus in Greece is 
The loveliest ruin, maybe— 

The old thing fell to pieces 
Before I was a baby. 


The Parthenon and Forum 
Are fine, but at a glance it 
Is evident that horum 
Nune gloria sic transit! 


“HE LEADETH ME” 37 


I cannot tell by half, oh, 
No, no! how happy I am 

To see the Isles of Sappho, 
The Ilion of Priam. 


Old Pharaoh keeps his mummy, 
Was proud to show it to me; 
A stiff old snob, as glum he 
Lay pickled, stark and gloomy. 


I’ve been a reckless spender, 
I’ve ridden donks with labor, 
TPve looked on ancient Endor 
From the summit of Mount Tabor. 


But lightning bolts may splinter 
Acacias on the mountains, 

The rigors of the winter 
May freeze Madeira’s fountains, 


Before I find or want a 
Surrounding that’s more canty 
Than every last Vermonter 
Sees all around his shanty. 


Since all the woods of Plainfield 
Are red and green and golden, 
Ill bide a wee ma ain field, 
Nae friends are like the olden. 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER 


“THERE is a forest fire on Spruce Mountain! 
How can I call the State forester?” 

So said Mrs. Goodridge, wife of the fore- 
man of the lumber camps, as she rushed into 
Leavitt's drug store in the cool early morning 
of the ninth of September, 1921. Spruce 
Mountain is the great, beautiful pyramid that 
stands on the horizon which is seen from the 
morningside windows of the Old Brick Manse. 
Tt is draped in forests from the roaring brook 
in the valley to the great rock pulpit of its 
peak. Pigeon Pond lies at its feet and all 
around it, up other mountains and across sev- 
eral towns, run unbroken leagues of forest. 
A fire on Spruce Mountain is a terrible thing. 

“Call Montpelier 480—State House,” I said; 
“then call Department of Agriculture and ask 
for Mr. Hastings!” 

Home I ran for rough clothing, ax, hoe, and 
shovel. I wanted to arrive with the first car- 
load. Four miles up the never-resting spiral 
of the shady “Brook Road’ we raced, then 
began to pull up the steep lumber road. At 
last, on foot, we reached the fire in the sag 
east of the mountain. It had not yet covered 

38 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER — 39 


two acres and was in an old lumber slash to 
which access was easy. Soon came reenforce- 
ments, one carload after another, and by the 
middle of the forenoon all the men and pails 
in Plainfield were there. Beating it into its 
own ashes, shoveling it under its own dirt and 
mosses, trenching around it, we soon had the 
fire conquered and confined. But to extin- 
quish it was a greater problem. The pulpy 
carpet of a forest floor will keep a fire dead 
and buried for a week when with burning sun 
and turning wind it rises in a resurrection unto 
hell. 

What matter? We had the men, we had the 
pails, and the mountain brook was a quarter 
of a mile away. A deep black basin was dug 
in its channel. We lined up our men in single 
file, nine feet apart, from the brook to the 
fire and around it. We dipped the pails full 
and passed them incessantly from hand to 
hand. When the thirsty ashes had drunk of 
their coolness the pails were tossed empty back 
down the line. New men arriving, our line 
closed up. To save time we stacked the 
“empties” and hurled them over two men for 
the third to catch. I had played toss and 
catch with a dozen pails then there was a 
pause. Surely all the empties had gone back 
down the line. The full pails, fast coming up, 


40 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


were now pressing hard upon me. I turned to 
catch one out of the hand of the man below 
me when there was a yell—too late. I felt 
a heavy impact on my own pate and fell over 
on one hand. I was up again and at work in 
a very nebulous world, when my neighbors 
were saying: 

“Here, take this handkerchief! Drop out 
of the line! You are bleeding a stream! Take 
this pail of water!” 

These in protest, for I continued until my 
left eye was blinded with gushing blood and 
I was dazed and uncertain. (I never again 
wore that old Panama—the one from which 
the brown rabbit had chewed the corners as I 
slept out under the scrub spruces one rainy 
night on Mount Clinton.) Fifteen minutes by 
a mossy stump with my head dipping now and 
then into the pail of cold water—and I took 
my place in the line once more. 

Hastings, the State forester, went past me. 
“What! he exclaimed, “the Educational De- 
partment? Seems to me you have a good 
many varieties of work.” 

“It is the nutmegs of life!’ 

W. S. Martin, owner of the forest, went 
past me. “‘What! You here?” he exclaimed, 
pleased and surprised. I was pleased with his 
pleasure and surprised at his surprise. Did he 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER 41 


think Plainfield had a pastor who could resist 
going to a forest fire? 

But the struggle was ebbing, the embers 
were drowned. Watchmen were stationed, and 
the men filed down the mountain, stopped for 
new doughnuts at the lumber camp, then rolled 
down the Brook Road homeward. 

I had been home half an hour when Mr. 
Martin called at the Old Brick Manse to in- 
quire for my injuries. He remarked that he 
had seen the high-school boys in the woods 
and asked me what reward he could give them 
——money or a treat? 

“Neither,” I told him. Something for the 
school as a whole would be good, but it was 
better for them not to have individual profit 
for joining in a public duty. 

“The Victrola!” said Nina, queen of the Manse. 

‘Surely!’ Then I told him how the school 
was trying to buy a Victrola and still lacked 
fifteen dollars. 

(No, if you care to know the purpose of 
this article, I am not writing a self-Boswellized 
autobiography. I am taking just a few pic- 
tures out of one week in September—it might 
as well have been any other week in the year 
—and by, these altogether representative scenes 
I want to show you the joy and variety of the 
rural pastorate.) 


42 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


T rested that afternoon and put up the big 
reference books on the new shelves in the hall 
just outside the green study. The hall had 
been newly papered in a pattern taken from 
a window in Rheims Cathedral—this to give 
it dignity, for it was to hold books of refer- 
ence, late publications of The Methodist Book 
Concern, diplomas and Wesley’s portrait—such 
things as, being worthy, were not quite worthy 
of being in the green study with the timeless 
old classics and Nina’s paintings of mountain 
and castle and sea. A new satisfaction was 
on me that afternoon, for I had measured in 
our garden a cabbage whose girdle was forty- 
seven inches and a sunflower with a stalk 
lacking only four inches of eleven feet. 

Then a black chariot rolled up to the door, 
driven by Marguerite, the dusky-haired girl 
who had been our stenographer in the Depart- 
ment of Education at the State House. The 
lad at her side was Henry, once a little boy in 
my Sunday-school class. I thought of a day 
during the week which I spent in Washington 
by the governor’s appointment, when I found 
Henry homesick in his military camp, got leave 
for him, took him to the Metropolitan Hotel 
to dinner, where the big black head-waiter 
amused us by parading before the mirror; then 
at evening Henry and I went to hear Billy 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER = 43 


Sunday preach—‘“‘Tt is appointed for man once 
to die, and after that the judgment.” Mar- 
guerite and Henry selected their marriage 
certificate and drove away. 

To go from pastoral services given to a fair 
bride to those given to a fat toad is incon- 
trovertibly anticlimactic. Nevertheless, on 
September 12, after I had mowed the lawn of 
the Old Brick Manse I found upon it a toad, 
beautifully bound in mottled brown morocco. 
He was hopping along with difficulty in the 
heavy dew. A green grass blade, wet with 
rain, was stuck on his back. As Nina reached 
down to disarm him of this vegetable sword 
he shut both his bright protruding eyes and 
put his nose down close to the ground between 
his curving arms, like a school boy dodging a 
blow. We tried to persuade him to hop back 
to the garden, but he persistently headed 
toward the road, where we knew he would be 
slain by the rolling tire of a rapid Buick—or 
a Dodge that he wouldn’t dodge. So when he 
reached the edge of that perilous dry Rubicon 
I picked him up on a shovel with all the dirt 
he sat on, took him to the garden and deposited 
him in the cucumber patch, where he sat 
awhile in meditation. 

On the fourteenth day of September I 
stopped at a little house on a lonely road. 


44 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Groves of poplar with fringes of pine grew 
around it. It had colonial pillars and faced 
a wide brook with deep crystal pools and roar- 
ing cascades down gullies of rock. 

Rolling her wheel chair to the open door as 
I stood on the pillared veranda, Sarah Chase 
invited me into the house, a poor but neat 
and cheerful home. I never have seen her 
large dark eyes without a smile, or her face 
other than happy and tranquil. 

She was soon telling me of kindnesses received. 
“There is so much good in people!” she said. 

“Yes,” I quoted, 


*“* “There is so much good in the worst of us 
And so much bad in the best of us, 
That it hardly becomes any of us 
To speak too ill of the rest of us— 


T can’t quote it right.” 

“I know. I have that verse and I can’t say 
it either. Well, they say there is honor among 
thieves, and I have often thought if robbers 
should come here when I was all alone and 
crippled, would they molest me? I don’t 
believe it!” | 

I looked out where yellow leaves were dotting 
the forested peaks, no other house in sight. 
Tt was a lonely place. She was paring yellow 
apples on which the sun was shining. 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER = 45 


“But I am really never alone,” she con- 
tinued, smiling. “Jesus is with me; I know 
it! When I was in the other house where the 
cupboards were high I would often be work- 
ing, and something that I must have at once 
would be out of my reach and I would be 
troubled; then I would trust in God to help 
me, and always just then some neighbor would 
call and put things where I could reach them.” 

“Are you happy in your afflictions?” 

“Yes, I have so many blessings. Though, of 
course, I should be glad to go—glad to go!” 

““How long have you been paralyzed?” 

“Thirty-three years last July. And it came 
so suddenly. It was night and the hired man 
was gone, so the hired girl and I went out to 
milk the cows—twenty-three of them. I had 
milked three and sat down to the fourth when 
everything seemed to go wrong and I sweat 
like rain and grew faint and weak. Little Cora 
was just old enough to run around and was 
teasing to have her milk and be put to bed. 
I got up and staggered to the house with help. 
I managed to put the little girl to bed and give 
her her milk. Then I lay down on the bed with 
a terrible pain in my back. Once more in the 
night I got up by taking hold of things and 
walked around the room. ‘Those steps were 
my last. In the morning when they helped 


46 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


me to rise I sank on the floor. I never walked 
again. 

“I am afraid I acted like a dunce about it 
at first. I saw the little girls running around, 
and saw other folks dressing them and I just 
looked at them and cried. After a long time 
I asked the doctor why he hadn’t told me at 
the first that I would never walk any more and 
he said: “You couldn’t stand it. You had just 
all you could bear.’ ” 

Looking at her, so serene and cheerful, I 
could not help asking, “Did it take you long 
to be reconciled?”’ 

“Oh, no, for that was after I was converted, 
in the old church up in Walden—the brightest 
spot on earth to me; that was my town—not 
much of a town either; but—oh, yes, it was, 
for that’s where I found God—no! God found 
me—tor I was rebellious a long time. I had 
an experience like Paul who was struck blind. 
It came in May and never lifted till Septem- 
ber—a great black cloud settled just above my 
head; it was square and black and twice as 
large as this room and heavy like black broad- 
cloth, so that if it should fall I knew I should 
hear it strike the floor.” 

I began to wonder if I heard her correctly. 
“Could you see this cloud?” I asked. 

“No, not with the physical eye, but it was 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER = 47 


there. I knew it. I could feel it—and it never 
lifted until September. That was the year 
the great fires raged in the forests of Canada 
and I had to take the washing in because the 
cinders fell on it.” 

Was there any psychological connection be- 
tween the impressiveness of those Canadian 
fires and her “cloud of God’s wrath’? The 
question crossed my mind but did not for an 
instant distract from the spiritual reality of her 
experience. 

“Right in harvest time,” Mrs. Chase went 
on, “long-continued special meetings were held, 
and at first I wouldn’t go. But I had begun 
to have strange feelings. When Christians went 
by the house I wanted to run out and talk 
with them. Then two friends came to see me. 
“Won’t you go to meeting with us?’ they said. 
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I can’t get the baby ready 
and my dishes are not done.’ 

*“*Get yourself ready,’ they said ‘and we'll do 
the dishes and get baby ready’—and I wouldn’t 
go—I that was brought up to go to church, 
and they had come just to help me—wasn’t 
that the meanest? But at last: I did go one 
afternoon. There weren’t many there, but all 
the ministers were there, and when the invita- 
tion was given I rose for prayers. And as I 
came out of the church Mrs. Patterson put 


48 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


her arms around my neck and said, ‘You’ll 
have hard places to cross over; but just remem- 
ber that Jesus is the best Friend you will ever 
have, and he will not fail you; and don’t you 
ever go back on Jesus Christ.’ Next I had to 
make open confession of my Lord. And first 
of all I had to tell the minister how I had 
felt toward him and his work. It was hard 
but I did it. And the great black cloud was 
gone.” 

With wild asters and goldenrod in my hand, 
with green checkerberry leaves in my mouth, 
and new lessons in my heart, I went home 
through pasture and forest to the Old Brick 
Manse to write this record. “Without thee 
all things are frivols,’’ Nina and I had read 
in a prayer of Thomas 4 Kempis that very 
morning, and here was I again taught by 
humble example to “wake in prayer and 1 in all 
things meek thyself. oe 

The next morning I made an early departure 
for the city of Montpelier, ten miles away. 
Responsibilities of the president of the trustees 
of Montpelier Seminary and duties of the State 
Board of Education were the outward sign, 
but I am afraid the real inward grace of my 
going was an earnest desire to win back from 
the framer the pictures Nina had painted for 
the green walls of my study. In the sunny 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER $49 


southeast room of the seminary I was having 
a glorious time discussing the Wood Art Gal- 
lery with the teacher-training class, when the 
principal opened the door and injected his head. 

“Beg pardon! You are wanted on the 
*phone.”’ | 

It was Nina’s voice calling. It was desired 
that some time that day I should visit Frank 
Jackson’s. 

“I will go now.” 

“They don’t expect you until afternoon. I 
told them you were coming on the train.” 

“That might be too late. It isn’t safe to wait.” 

For I remembered the dying elderly woman 
whom I had visited a few days before. Her 
little Roman Catholic nurse had said to me: 

“I’m not Protestant, but they tell me you 
are the pastor. I want you to come in the 
room with my patient and say a prayer over 
her. She may not know you, but that won’t 
make any difference, you know.” 

I had gone into the darkened room. I had 
enough of my Catholic sister’s faith to believe 
that prayer would avail even if the patient 
did not know. But I would rather that she 
knew. I spoke to the sufferer. She did know 
me, she talked with me, and I prayed for her. 
When I rose to go, the tears came to the nurse’s 
eyes. 


50 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


“Thank you,” she said, “you have helped 
me too—so much.” 

“We are all brothers and sisters,” I said, 
“whatever our church.” 

“Yes,” she said, “‘and we are going to the 
same heaven, and we’re all working for the 
same Man, and that is God.”’ 

In ten minutes after being called on the 
telephone I was on the road. In forty minutes, 
after rolling through Plainfield without stop- 
ping, I was in that white farmhouse under the 
pines, on the hill in Marshfield. 

“Oh,” said the dying woman in the dark- 
ened room, “I didn’t think you would come 
till night. They said you were in Mont- 
pelier.”’ 

“I was, but I came as soon as I heard you 
wanted me.” 

“You had important engagements.” 

“I can leave them all when I am needed by 
my people.” 

“You are a dear, good pastor! Is my little 
girl here? Are they all here?” 

The nurse had given place to me by the 
patient’s head, and herself sat near me where 
I could consult her in whispers as I needed. 
On the other side of the bed sat the daughter. 
Little Irene, the orphan whom they had 
adopted, was in the nurse’s arms. All were 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER 51 


weeping. The patient was passing into parox- 
ysms of agony followed by stupor. 

“I wouldn’t have given the hypodermic if I 
had known,” said the nurse. 

“When did you give it?” asked the daughter. 

“Tt was just a little before brother came.” 

I was touched by this reference to me by 
my Catholic sister. 

“What shall I do?” I asked her. “TI can 
wait here just as long as needed, or I can come 
again late in the afternoon, but it doesn’t 
seem safe to trust that—it might be too late.” 

“Td rather you would wait here if you can.” 

After a while the patient opened her eyes 
and moaned out, ‘““Oh,—are you here, Brother 
Hewitt—hold my hands—let me keep hold of 
your hands! I am in the dark valley, and I 
want someone to help me—oh help me!” 

“ “Yea, though I walk through the valley of 
the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for 
thou art with me!’ Tell me,” I said, “‘what 
troubles you, what is on your heart, what did 
you want to tell me?”’ 

Firmly I held the old lady’s hands in mine. 

“Oh, I have such doubts, and: I am afraid.” 

“Don’t you believe in God, in Jesus Christ; 
doesn’t it seem to you that heaven is real?” 

“Yes, I do—but oh, I’ve been so long—and 
now I’m going to die—and I want to go—” 


52 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


but ch—I’m not good enough to go to heaven.’’ 

“None of us are—in our own goodness. 
Don’t you remember the Bible says, ‘Lord, if 
thou shouldst mark iniquities, who could 
stand?’ But he doesn’t. In the mercy of our 
Saviour he forgives all our sins. ‘Him that 
cometh to me I will in no wise cast out— ” 

“Yes, I’ve often thought of that, so often!” 

“The thief on the cross wasn’t good enough 
to be saved, but because he cast himself on 
the Saviour’s mercy he went with him to 
paradise. We are saved only by Jesus Christ. 
Don’t think of your own goodness at all. 
Can’t you trust in Christ alone? Ask him to 
forgive your sins, give yourself to Jesus Christ 
alone. 

‘In my hand no price I bring, 
Simply to thy cross I cling.’ 
Can’t you do this?” 

“T love everybody—everybody—I_ haven’t 
any grudge at all—I just know I forgive every- 
body,” she answered. Irrelevant? Oh, no. 
I didn’t ask its history, the fact of forgiveness 
was enough, but I remembered that long ago 
this sufferer and her husband had been mem- 
bers of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and 
long before my pastorate it was written against 
their names that they had withdrawn, and 
never again did they come to church. 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER 53 


“Are you sure you forgive everybody?” 

“Yes—yes—I know it!” 

“Then can’t you believe that God for 
Christ’s sake forgives you?” 

“Ob, pray for me! Pray for me.” 

I knelt, and though heavily burdened and 
unworthy, I pressed my way up to the throne 
of God as far as I could. 

But the dark valley was not yet clear and 
shining. And again the sufferer quivered like 
aspen leaves from her nervous reactions. Again 
came the deadly stupor and the darkness. 
Again we waited in silence, the nurse at my 
side with the little orphan in her arms, the 
daughter weeping. 

Consciousness dawned at length. 

“Is my little girl here?” 

“Yes,” said the nurse. “Little Irene is — 
right here.” 

“She is a darling! Oh, Brother Hewitt! I 
wish you could have yours!” 

(This was a reference to Baby Hilda. She 
came to the Old Brick Manse one morn- 
ing in March. She was put to bed in the 
graveyard under the April grasses on Good 
Friday.) 

‘God knows I want her,” I answered, “‘but 
heaven is dearer as it is. I shall find baby 
where ‘there is no death, neither sorrow nor 


54 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


crying, neither shall there be any more pain, 
for the former things are passed away.’ ” 

“*Yes—and my little Irene is a darling—and 
she is a darling [meaning her daughter] and my 
dear husband—’’. 

“Call them,” said the daughter. 

The husband and the son-in-law came in 
and took the old lady’s hand in turn. 

“My dear husband—and my dear Herbert— 
Oh, they’ve all been so good to me. I don’t 
want to leave them, I want them always to 
be with me.” 

“They are with you now,” I said, “‘and they 
can be with you forever. Listen: These are 
the words of Jesus I am reading: ‘Let not your 
heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe 
also in me. In my Father’s house are many 
mansions: if it were not so, I would have told 
you. I go to prepare a place for you. And 
if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come 
again, and receive you unto myself; that where 
I am, there ye may be also.’ We are going 
to be with our dear ones forever and ever. 
We are going to look upon the face of Jesus 
Christ, world without end.” 

A radiance came over the dying face like the 
sunset light on Mount Shasta, as I saw it long ago 
from the Sacramentocanyon. Again the sufferer 
sank away for alittle. Then I heard her saying, 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER 355 


“Honestly and truly this is the end of the 
world for me—world without end—world with- 
out end!” 

Those last words gave me great hope. 

“O God! Go with me!”’ she cried suddenly. 

“God is with you,” I said. “You cannot 
see him, but he is here in this room. This is 
his promise, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even 
unto the end of the world.’ And this is his 
promise: ‘When thou passest through the 
waters, I will be with thee, and through the 
rivers, they shall not overflow thee.’ and this 
is his promise too: ‘Peace I leave with you, 
my peace I give unto you; not as the world 
giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart 
be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’ ”’ 

Then, not with fear but with confidence, I 
heard her saying, “Go with me! Go with me! 
Go with me!’ Over and over again the same 
prayer with a cadence and a repetition like a 
whippoorwill calling in the forest beside a 
mountain lake. 

*“Let me help you pray,” I said. “O God 
most high, our heavenly Father—” 

“God most high, our heavenly Father—” 

It has never happened so with me before, — 
but with earnest emphasis she repeated every 
word of my prayer from beginning to end. 

““__be with us in this valley of the shadow. 


56 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


We have sinned and have been unworthy, but 
thy mercy is like the wideness of the sea. For 
Jesus, our dear Redeemer’s sake, forgive us all 
that is past. It is dark, and we cannot find 
thee alone, but reach down to us our Father’s 
hand, and lead us to our Father’s house. We 
love thee, we trust thee, we cling to thee, 
thee only— 


‘All my hope on thee is stayed, 
All my help from thee I bring; 
Cover my defenseless head 
With the shadow of thy wing.’ 


Save us out of the deeps of death to thy heaven 
of light. Keep thou our dear ones too. Guard 
them against the loss of one. Bring them to 
thy kingdom that fadeth not away, and there, 
with them, may we look upon thy face in glory, 
forever and ever. Amen.” 

“Forever and ever. Amen!” 

We Yankees have a way of saying “Yes” 
by murmuring with closed lips the syllables 
“um-hm.” ‘The dying woman lay with a new 
light on her face, ever and anon nodding her 
head and murmuring these syllables as_ if 
answering to some invisible presence. 

“O Brother Hewitt! It’s all right with me 
now—I know it,” she said soon. 

“Do you have any doubts?” 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER 57 


“Oh, no, no! No doubts! No more fears. 
I know God is with me.” 

\“Are you sure he saves you?” 

*“Yes—yes.” 

And at every return after her lapses of con- 
sciousness her confidence remained. ‘She was 
not ready to die, but now she is prepared, I 
know!” said the nurse. 

“f won't need to keep you any longer—God 
bless you,” said the dying woman. “It is all 
right with me now. I know. Oh, thank you! 
God bless you! Come and do for me the last 
things of earth.” 

“I will. The peace of God which passeth all 
understanding abide with you for evermore. 
Good-by.” 

“Amen. Good-by.”’ 

I went out of the darkened room knowing 
that Irene Jackson would soon rise from the 
pain-torn husk of her body to stand in the 
presence of God. 

Going out into the rain I rolled rapidly back 
in the black chariot to the unfinished business 
in the city. As I went past the Old Brick Manse 
I stopped a moment. “There is sorry news,” 
said Nina. “I don’t know whether to tell you 
now.” 

**Yes. What is it?” 

“Raymond Pike is dead.” 


58 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Raymond! Twenty-seven years old. Skilled 
graduate agriculturalist. Steward of my church. 
Tithing faithfully and generous in gifts. Mar- 
ried in the presence of the congregation on 
Claremont Camp Ground less than a month 
ago! And now—stricken with paralysis and 
dead. 

Oh, how swiftly (as my old friend Angelo 
Dougherty said in his sermon) “the four walls 
fall asunder, and we, sooner than we think, 
stand in Zion, and before God!” 

Glorious with blazing sun and moving moon 
was the day which ended the week. I used 
it visiting the shut-in. Two were old soldiers. 
One of them told me war tales of the Shenan- 
doah Valley. The other lay with blinded eyes 
and tortured body under the eaves of his 
ninetieth year, waiting for death, bearing his 
afflictions with great patience, leaning on the 
Everlasting Arms. His voice broke as he told 
me of his little sister who taught him to love 
God. He was nine years old then. His father 
was dead, his mother was ill. The little lady 
of eleven years gathered her flock of brothers 
and sisters around her and read to them from 
the Bible in mother’s stead, and made them 
say their prayers. Dear, motherly child—we 
spend our years as a tale that is told—to-night 
her little brother is dying at ninety—and for 


ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER 59 


nearly eighty years the grasses have been 
green on her own little grave. Another sister 
grew to middle age and died saying: “I can 
see Jesus! | I can see Jesus!” And when they 
asked her, ““Where?” she cried, “There! There!” 
and pointed upward. If divine casements open 
for dying eyes on things unseen which are 
eternal, I know not—I only know that one 
rural pastor has heard truthful people telling 
him of strange visions. 

Under the ocean-blue sky I breathed freely. 
The day’s work was ended. I tore open an 
envelope out of my mail. What was this? 
For seven years I had not received an anony- 
mous letter, and now—well, it is not so bad 
after all: 

“The students of the Plainfield Junior High 
School wish to thank Mr. Hewitt for mention- 
ing to Mr. Martin that they needed fifteen 
dollars more on their Victrola.” 

Whence I inferred that the suggestion was 
fruitful, but it was Nina who made it. Ever 
and anon credit is accorded to the pastor 
where wisdom is of the wife. 


THE THIRTEENTH LABOR OF 
HERCULES 


Dark things lie under the shadows of 
steeples among the hills. The country pastor’s 
task is the thirteenth labor of Hercules. San 
Francisco sins in the face of the sun; Chicago 
is called the “scarlet city”; and Cortland Myers 
walks the platform of Tremont Temple erying, 
“OQ wicked Boston!’ Surely, we say, the 
idyllic country is holier, where steeples lift 
through the amethyst twilight. Not wholly 
so. Human nature is one. Among green hills 
and golden harvests are ebony evil things. 
Did someone think that the rural pastorate is 
a job for superannuates and greenhorns? Trot 
him out. Look at him! There is not hide 
enough in the tannery to make ears for so 
total an ass. Under the rural steeple is the 
mightiest work beneath the stars. 

You shall measure it, first, by the sms which 
the shepherd on lonely pastures must face. I 
read this in a Zion’s Herald editorial: “(New 
Jersey reports a case where rural Christianity 
seems to have disappeared, where wives are 
exchanged or loaned, and where ignorance and 
apathy are universal. A Connecticut minister 

60 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 61 


reports from rural sections which two genera- 
tions ago were occupied by stalwart Christian 
men and women. These same sections now 
furnish terrible tales of illicit relationships, of 
incest breeding idiocy, of frequent crimes of 
violence, and cheap whisky every where.””! 

One rural family which I knew could furnish 
material for a vivid tale by Poe, and its title 
would be “The Tragic House.” Furious hus- 
band and wife literally clawed each other’s 
faces like angry cats, till divorce took them 
apart. It was the wife who went away. Three 
were then left in the family—the old mother, 
the brother, the sister, all alike in evil temper, 
living out their angry days unlighted from the 
heavens. The son cursed his old mother till 
at last she slunk into her grave out of his 
sight. Brother and sister were left alone, the 
last of the circle of love. Often in the gray 
twilight that sister made the whole mountain- 
side ring with her screaming. At length the 
man died, his own hangman. Years later the 
sister died, a pauper, in the madhouse. In a 
fantastic dream I saw that poor suicide till- 

‘The author is not simply telling things he has read. He 
could fill the pages with harrowing details of moral degen- 
eracy in rural communities, derived from personal obser- 


vatien and careful investigation, not only in his own State 
but ia widely scattered sections of the land. 


62 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


ing his fields in the April dusk, and I cried 
out, “Go back! You are dead! What right 
have you to till the fields? I thought you 
had committed suicide!’ And he replied gloom- 
ily, “Oh, yes, I did. But I have repented of 
that!’ In a dream perhaps, but in no reality, 
will any repentance destroy the effect of a 
sin that is done. But as I remember that 
Tragic House (near neighbor to our own) I 
verily believe that its sins might have been 
prevented, its awful gloom changed to a bit 
of glory, by just a few loving visits of God’s 
messengers of peace, by just a little of the 
pastoral care which it never had at all. I was 
only a boy; I didn’t know much; but I cannot 
be sure to-day that my own garments came 
clean from the tragedy. 

These are not isolated cases of their kind, 
and I will not pause to talk about lesser sins 
of various kinds, though I was once fascinated 
by the varieties of Sabbath-breaking which I 
counted between my two preaching appoint- 
ments within ten miles of our capital city. 
Here they are: Haymaking with men and 
teams; gardening; playing baseball (though we 
are a little in doubt now whether Sunday base- 
ball is to be ealled a sin or a means of grace); 
fishing; building houses; running factory ma- 
chines; selling cattle; trading in groceries, and 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 63 


butchering hogs. These all are sins of act. 
But the sins of attitude are what really make 
the rural work hardest, such as unmovable 
spiritual laziness, indifference, conservatism, 
gospel-hardened hearts, ete. I quit this part 
of the theme not because I am out of the 
woods, but because the vista is so long. 

The second measure of the great task is 
the sorrow the lone shepherd must comfort. 

Through unending monotony and the gloom 
of uninspired isolation there is a vast amount 
of dull, hopeless discouragement in the coun- 
try. This ends in nervous wreckage and 
insanity, sometimes in suicide. The rural 
pastor is not only preventing sin, he is saving 
life and mind. “I don’t know what ails me,” 
said an old man, “I don’t know what to do, 
but I’m so lonesome all the time—oh, so lone- 
some!’ A poor mother on a mountain farm 
met my pastoral visit by bursting into tears 
and saying, “Oh, somehow I felt just as if 
you would come to-day, I have so many 
troubles and problems that I want you to 
help me about!” Then she told me things 
which were beyond my wisdom to solve, and 
how a little more of the dull burden would 
mean insanity. I was alarmed at the fool I 
must appear, for I did not know what to say. 
At length she surprised me by saying, “You 


64 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


have settled my problem so nicely. You have 
given me just the help which I needed!” Then 
I knew it was sympathy, not wisdom, which 
she needed, for not a problem had I solved. 

Sometimes it is vague, undefined sorrow that 
one meets; sometimes it is bitter indifference 
or rebellion; or the very life of a worried beast 
of the field; or the spirit breaking under hope- 
less poverty; or the heart breaking for children 
gone away; or the body dying when money 
and skill would save it. Along Orange Grove 
Avenue in Pasadena no man builds a house 
for less than twenty thousand dollars. Down 
where Bellevue Avenue leads to Cliff Walk 
and the ocean are the stone mansions of those 
who have limitless millions. But up among 
the northern rocks and forests I have con- 
ducted many a funeral that a little money 
might have prevented. I can show you moth- 
ers’ mounds and baby graves which would not 
have been but for stark poverty and isolation 
from the specialist’s skill. This is a price 
which I myself have paid, and I know whereof 
I speak. Our country doctors are magnificent 
men, but they are called for every kind of 
practice, and they cannot be at their best 
in all. 

Having selected the farm of their heart’s 
desire a father and mother begin the long fight 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 65 


against debt. When at last their home is all 
paid for, they no longer want it. They have 
lived there so long that no other place will 
ever be home, but now they are growing old, 
aliens have taken the places of their old neigh- 
bors, and the city has called away their own 
children whom they had hoped to lean upon— 
the city that will never give them back, 


“For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more— 
We'll maybe return to Lochaber no more.” 


Nine years of my boyhood [ pulled the 
scratchy woolens over my naked, shivering 
little carcass in a room where the frost was 
a quarter of an inch thick on the bare plaster, 
Downstairs there were a few rough wooden 
dining chairs and one uncushioned rocker; no 
silver on the table, no pictures on the walls, 
and but one little kitchen fire in all the wintry 
house. Father and mother owned that house 
one later day and it was full of comforts, 
Meantime what had happened? Grandfather 
and grandmother were in the churchyard. The 
boys were all married and gone away, all but 
the youngest, who had planned to stay on the 
farm, and he has been under the grasses for 
thirteen years. Death laid his hand on my 
father’s arteries. Could the place seem like 
home any more to my lonely mother? Yet 


66 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


this is the common story of the country home. 
The long struggle against debt ends in tri- 
umph—and loneliness. It is like a man walk- 
ing a woodland road beside a singing brook. 
White birches and green ferns are spangled by 
the golden sunlight, and the man walks on. 
Sunset falls, and gloaming, and “after that, the 
dark.” At the end of the road he finds an 
empty house where the mosses cover the sag- 
ging roof and the broken windows glisten to 
the moon. When at last the home is his very 
own it is empty. There is no abiding place 
here. We must look for a better country, that 
is an heavenly, “Where no evil thing cometh 
to despoil what is fair.” 

Did you ever think who, besides the super- 
annuate, is sent to comfort the peculiar sorrows 
which haunt the country? It is not the man 
in his prime, except in some instances of men 
who never had any prime. It is the greenest 
and youngest apprentice who goes‘ to the 
country church. Many, many country pastors 
are mere boys, vividly imaginative; and in the 
long walks between rural homes one cannot 
shake off the thought of what he has seen 
and heard as he could do on the lively street 
where call and call are near. On the long, 
lonely walks the sorrows of the last home rise 
before a boy’s imagination, reach out their 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 67 


gaunt hands and clutch weirdly hold. Shall 
I ever forget the eyes of that forty-year-old 
mother looking up at me when they told her 
she had three new cancers and had to die? 
Shall I forget the cries of her babies, “Mamma! 
Mamma!” all through the funeral service? 
Can I forget the letters of mothers whose girls 
have gone wrong? Can I forget the sobs and 
screams of that woman whose husband was | 
struck dead in the night when the hurricane 
hurled through his skull a branch of the tree? 
She would not say a word, she would not let 
go my hand, she would not look anywhere but 
at my eyes, dumbly beseeching me to say 
something and to be quick about it, and God 
knows I didn’t know how! Shall I ever forget 
my first funeral of a suicide? Two young 
women had never been away from home, till 
one summer afternoon (when the elder was 
twenty-six) they were offered a carriage to 
drive for a few miles. They didn’t know how 
to drive and they caused another carriage to 
overturn. Terrified, the poor ignorant girls 
took carbolic acid. In their naked home of 
illiterate poverty, while I read: the ritual at 
the coffin of the elder, I could hear the groans 
of the younger, soon to die. And who was I 
to bring comfort to that father and mother? 
Just a boy in my earliest twenties, a beginner 


68 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


such as over and over again forever are sent 
to those remote places, if they have any pastor 
at all. And shall I forget that other suicide, 
the aged woman? Her children looked out 
of a black window at night just as the vivid 
lightning showed them their mother hanging 
stark to an apple tree. And on the hills of 
West Glover one sunset hour, shall I ever 
forget—but that is stark horror—too ghastly, 
too piteous to tell. Out in the black darkness 
of starless nights, when one comes home weary 
on the long walks, these sorrows play dirges 
on the heart, these horrors play leapfrog with 
the imagination. Four miles from my Plain- 
field manse, on a road through the woods, I 
was passing a ruined house which looked 
empty, and it was at dusk of evening. Sud- 
denly came the unmistakable call, the strange 
impression that I ought to visit that house. 
A feeble old woman met me at the door and 
showed me the bed where her husband lay, 
under the unsanitary nursing of the peasantry. 
Shall I ever forget how, in the awful stench of 
that room, he gibbered through the hideous 
grin of his lipless teeth? He pointed his finger 
to a bottle and there, pickled, were the great 
cancers that had eaten his face to the bone! 
In the long walks when one is alone with his 
thoughts these horrors ride neck and neck 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 69 


with his imagination like Faust and Mephis- 
topheles, rushing along on black horses at 
night. And when the pastor is a boy, as so 
often the country pastor is, it is hard. 

Most of the sorrows, of course, are not spec- 
tacular ones; they are inconspicuous, dull- 
aching ones. And from these it is harder to 
find relief in rural life. Country life is intensely 
subjective. In the city one can turn to a 
great variety of external interests. But, “‘Com- 
fort, comfort ye my people,” is a large com- 
mission to any rural pastor. 

Third measure of the country pastor’s task 
—the numbers of his people and the miles, 
mountains, woods, plains, and valleys, over 
which they are scattered. 

If anybody thinks the country pastor’s work 
is small because he has few people, it is a bad 
mistake. It is not for lack of sheep that 
these pastures are lonely. When Bishop Hen- 
derson called for a “constituency roll’? in the 
Vermont Conference the pastor in our capital 
city reported a thousand people, and the bishop 
remarked on the size of his parish. Because I 
think my own an ordinary rural parish I use 
it for illustration. In a township of about 
nine hundred people ours is the only working 
church, and through the village where its 
steeple rises runs the line of a neighboring 


70 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


township, with a third town line at angles 
with this a mile away. This means that our 
constituents come from parts of three towns. 
Two and a half, three, and seven miles away 
are other churches; but if you subtract all who 
would naturally attend those churches, and all 
Catholics, you still have an absolute minimum 
of twelve hundred people who must have evan- 
gelical church privileges with us or not at all. 

Our people are proud to see the church well 
filled every Sunday, membership and congrega- 
tions at the high-water mark of our history, 
but the task is yet untouched. Church (floor 
and gallery) will hardly seat two hundred and 
fifty. That means that if our largest Sunday- 
morning congregation were chloroformed or 
transported to the moon, and if one half of 
the constituency remaining should come to 
church only one half of the time, no one per- 
son coming on two successive Sundays, we 
could hardly give them seats. If we were 
really successful, we should be no fools if we 
said, “I will pull down my barns and build 
larger.” 

The gathering of a congregation in the coun- 
try is difficult. One has to contend with stay- 
at-home habits (many people never leave home 
twice a year for anything); numerous chores on 
the farm, together with Sunday-morning trips 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 71 


to the creamery which aggravate the already 
difficult [problem of transportation over many 
miles; physical overwork during the week; 
difficulties of a subjective nature—poor folks 
away back on the farm feeling diffident about 
“coming to the village where the folks dress 
better and are stuck up.” Some fear to go 
lest they suffer theft while gone. It is very 
hard after chores to dress a family of children 
and get them many miles to morning service 
in time. Sunday or none is the day of the 
farmer’s visiting and of his reading. Then, as 
in the city, so even here in the villages, one 
man gets his Sunday headache, another the 
Sunday Globe; one man has an attack of 
biliousness and is confined to the house; another 
has an attack of automobiliousness and is con- 
fined to the public highway. 

I have given you in number of people the 
size of a representative rural parish. Think 
with me a little further. What of pastoral 
visiting in the country? 

If I had these people in a city, I might have 
the benefit of proximity or of the trolley, where 
now it is shoe leather and magnificent distance. 
For, with the speedometer of an automobile, I 
have found that there are, measured in one 
_ direction only, with no part of the road counted 
a second time, eighty-one miles of highway 


72 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


along which my people live. With an auto, 
and making no stops, it is possible to go up 
one road and down another. But since the 
people have an absurd prejudice against calls 
made after midnight, a pastor has to visit 
part of his road, then return and start anew 
the next day, with the result that he travels 
much of his road four times over. The normal 
amount of travel in making one visitation of 
my parish is two hundred and fifty miles, the 
absolute minimum two hundred miles. ‘This 
refers only to my main parish and does not 
at all include an out-appointment where the 
same conditions are repeated on a smaller 
scale. And if I did not believe this parish to 
be a representative, average rural parish, I 
should not thus blatantly mention it. The 
week’s work is not easy. 

That some of our villages are overchurched 
I do not doubt, but I am perfectly convinced 
that the greater part of the territory of our 
State is wholly unevangelized ground. The 
great majority of its people never once come 
to church, never once are visited by any pastor. 
Very few people go to church from more than 
two miles away, and when the pastor from 
Hemlock Dell visits he goes out only so far as 
he finds people who come to his church; he 
does not go until he finds people who go to 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 13 


Moss Glen Church; neither does he agree with 
the Moss Glen pastor to define the borders 
between them. By far the largest part of the 
rural field falls forsaken between fold and fold. 
Why are stalwart recruits for the ministry so 
few? Because the mighty Martin Luthers of 
the day are out there in that belt of oblivion 
which circles every country charge as Saturn 
is encircled by his rings, and will remain un- 
converted till they die, for no man careth for 
their souls. A district superintendent driving 
with a pastor through miles of country homes 
asked, ““Whose people are these?” “Nobody’s,”’ 
was the careless answer. If the church thrives 
as an institution, pastor and people are sel- 
fishly unconcerned about the great outlying 
country, the people to whom it ought to min- 
ister. The church is busy saving itself. Will 
it never know that nothing would so electrify 
and vitalize any church as to forget itself in 
saving others? And so vast is the field that 
the rank and file of the church will have to 
take sickles and have a hand in the reaping. 
But very often, instead of furnishing healthy 
reapers, a church is itself suffering from a 
strange epidemic which may be called the 
“cussedness’” of saints. The man of the world 
points a finger of scorn at those thus afflicted. 
It is hard to answer him because you know in 


74 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


your heart he is right. If Christianity really 
made folks like some professed Christians we 
know, we should shun it as the pest, but, 
thank God, it isn’t Christianity which does it. 
It is true this disease is by no means confined 
to the country church, but because of the 
greater relative importance of the rural indi- 
vidual it is more harmful here. The ‘“‘cussed- 
ness’ of saints has acute forms, manifesting 
itself in ructions and backslidings, but mostly 
it is a malady tending to be chronic and leav- 
ing the patient in obtuse unconsciousness of 
his affliction. Its symptoms are manifold. 
Sometimes it manifests itself in cutaneous 
hyperesthesia, especially when officers of the 
society are changed or the other fellow’s 
opinion is chosen. Sometimes the disease man- 
ifests itself in a total inability to define. For 
instance, Bishop Hamilton told us about some 
stewards who signed petitions for their pastor’s 
return, then personally protested to him against 
it. Or, to take another instance, a pastor pro- 
posed a slight reform in methods. The officer 
addressed suggested objections which might 
arise on the part of others—she herself, of 
course, would favor it. Then in all corners of 
the church the pastor heard her slyly talking 
against the reform. At length she brought 
back word that under the new system she 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 75 


couldn’t find helpers. Now, in both these 
instances the patients supposed that they were 
persons of diplomatic policy “for the good of 
the church,” whereas the dictionary would de- 
fine them as cowards and liars. 

Another manifestation of the disease is a 
tendency to imitate. The patient does not 
imitate Christ, but, rather, that which he him- 
self worships. So, like a child writing each 
line worse than the former because copying 
from his own lines rather than from the teach- 
ers, the patient goes on imitating his own 
past conduct. This imitative tendency usually 
takes for its model some animal. Certain 
patients have evolved striking likenesses to the 
ass and the hog, or even the peacock. But 
the strange thing about the malady is that 
while these imitations have been perfected, the 
patient all the while supposed he was imitating 
something “else, for example, the lion or the 
owl; and cases are on record where the patient 
has ripped out the most stertorous gruntings, 
all the while supposing that he was cooing like 
a dove. 

The financial manifestation of the “cussed- 
ness’ of saints should be hinted. Men wonder 
why it is hard to raise money for the pastor 
(that is the way they put it, and often make 
beggary of it by appealing on the ground of 


76 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


the pastor’s personal need), when their infernal 
parsimony keeps the salary so low that it com- 
pels the appointment of that kind of pastor 
for whom it is always hard to raise money. 
Having fixed a salary at a mimimum, the 
officials let it slide along unpaid until the end 
of the year, and if they do not find it con- 
venient to pay it all then, they will sometimes 
ask the pastor to lie about it for their credit 
and report it all paid, “because, you know, it 
is all pledged, and will be paid some time.”’ 
In one case, close upon the end of the year, 
with salary unpaid, there was sickness and 
death in the parsonage. While the pastor was 
planning how to pay doctor, trained nurse, and 
undertaker, his financial agent sent word that 
he could not stop to collect the overdue salary 
“because his sows were pigging’! To the 
credit of human nature be it said that before 
the financial agent got through “pigging,”’ the 
loyal people, unsolicited, came forward one by 
one and paid and overpaid the pastor. For 
the fault is not with the people at large, but 
with the (lack of) business organization of the 
little churches. Often those who are in posi- 
tions of trust and leadership are so narrow as 
to be the most retarding element in the church. 
In one church certain official members deplored 
the extravagance of spending forty dollars for 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 77 


printing and advertising when they saw with 
their own eyes that the expenditure brought in 
automatically and in advance thirty per cent 
more cash than had been raised in other years 
when second solicitations had been necessary. 
One financial agent in all seriousness made this 
proposition to a board of stewards: “The salary 
is five hundred dollars, and there is just fifty 
dollars deficit. The minister practices tithing, 
SO we are coming out just even.”’ (!) 

The day is past when I suffer from these 
things, so I may freely speak of them. A 
church chooses the expenses of a minister to 
suit their taste, then it chooses his salary to 
suit their stinginess, then its members expect 
him to be gratefully silent, for they think (at 
least they sometimes say) that a minister 
should be more consecrated than to speak of 
salary. So we won’t speak of it any more, 
but will pass from the financial to the spiritual 
“cussedness’”’ of saints. 

By this we do not mean sins of act, though 
I have seen in open Sabbath-school session a 
red-faced married steward of a certain church 
putting his arm around a maiden im the class 
he taught. I want to speak of something not 
quite so exceptional—that apathy and _ self- 
centered indifference, where winsome, working 
lovingkindness should be. A kind woman of 


78 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


middle age and many afflictions gives every 
year to the benevolences of a country church 
more than its three wealthiest members; but 
she cannot be persuaded to join that church 
because its members have neglected her so 
long that she feels “‘it is better to go her way 
alone.” 

For the first time in his life a veteran of 
Gettysburg, threescore and ten years old, gave 
his heart to Christ, desiring baptism before the 
congregation, and membership in the church. 
On the appointed day, sick in bed, he was 
unable to appear. I visited him faithfully 
every week through a winter of illness, but at 
its end the veteran handed back his Proba- 
tioner’s Companion, saying that he would not 
be baptized, for he “‘guessed they did not want 
him.” Within three minutes’ walk of the 
church, not a member had visited him through 
all the winter, though many of them knew 
both of his illness and of his conversion. I 
never saw him in the church after that day. 
How much of a pastor’s work is icily desolated 
by the same people who demand results from 
his ministry! 

When those who long have been members of 
the church ask me who is to join at the next 
communion I have been able frequently to say 
that such and such persons, of their own 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 79 


accord, were asking baptism and membership, 
professing conversion. Have I heard a glad, 
loving approval, saying, “It is good, and I 
will help them all I can!” or have I seen the 
least show of Christian welcome? Sometimes, 
but too often have I heard, “Well, I hope he'll 
lead a different life!’ spoken with a super- 
cilious smile. There is criticism in the presence 
of the saints of the church over one sinner that 
repenteth by more than ninety and nine mem- 
bers who need that same repentance. Cold- 
hearted, superior, critical, they sit afar, guard- 
ing the purity of the church by numbering the 
sins which God has forgiven. But they lament 
the passing of the old-time revivals; and still 
their shepherd goes out to the mountains aching 
with the knowledge that every lamb he brings 
home will die by their hardness of heart. No, 
not that—it is only thoughtlessness, but it is 
dead wrong and ought to stop. 

Fain would I also be to have folks patient 
concerning the much demanded pastoral trot. 
_ With more than a thousand people to call upon, 
I have called for the fourth time in a year 
upon a family who shut me away, in a sitting 
room while, behind the closed kitchen door, I 
could hear them discussing why the minister 
didn’t call oftener. 

All the foregoing being anent the “cussed- 


80 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


ness” of saints, I dismiss it with a kick. [I 
like it not, and, as I shall make perfectly 
clear before I quit, the malady is not general. 
Blacken it and multiply it by ten and it can- 
not change the fact that the country is still 
filled with nature’s noblemen. It is not strange 
that among so many folk of the church there 
should now and then be one who thought he 
had the grace of God when it turned out to 
be biliousness. 

The next handicap of the country church is 
the inefficiency of its ministry. There are 
shining exceptions to this rule (you parsons 
who are just now stiffening your necks and 
getting mad over this passage are doubtless 
such), but for generations the rural work has 
suffered generally and fatally from this cause. 

Great numbers of our country preachers are 
uneducated—have never been to college or 
seminary; many have never even completed a 
course In a secondary school. Some of them 
are not to be blamed, for they did their best 
and couldn’t bring it to pass, but innocent as 
the defect may be, it is still a defect. In most 
cases, however, it is a handicap of the man’s 
own choosing. He prefers to get at his work 
early rather than to pay the price of prepa- 
ration. 

But I am not talking about the minister’s 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 81 


schooling. That is the least of our cares when 
we speak of mental unfitness. That a man 
should be unschooled we can forgive. Many a 
splendidly educated man has never been to 
college. Education is not determined by cir- 
cumstances; it is foreordained by temperament. 
Still the fact remains that, entirely apart from 
the question of their schooling, great droves of 
country ministers are ignorant, are so temper- 
amentally unmental that they never can be 
educated. The majority of them, though de- 
siring this very thing, will not for one instant 
be considered, either by appointing powers or 
by people, as intellectually fit for the churches 
in the cities and large villages. By what 
reason, then, are they any more fit for the 
church at Pine Mountain? The really brilliant 
young men are promoted from the rural min- 
istry to supply urban demand. They are never 
left in the country church longer than enough 
to prove their prowess. Soon as they begin to 
transfigure rural life they are called, and they 
are glad to go. We cannot stop to discuss 
their reasons, but it is this one fact which 
breaks the heart: Forever, if a man is found 
feeble and mentally unfit, he is left to the 
rural work. 

A minister who had preached for years told 
me that he never had read the Bible through. 


82 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


The following, without change of a word, is 
quoted from a country preacher’s sermon on 
Ruth, after a Scripture lesson about the 
Saviour: 

Ruth she went into the land of Mobe, and married 
Booze and out of that come the Saviour to which the 
scripture was read this afternoon, but they was forty-two 
generations betwixt him and Adam and he come through 
’em all. 

A little later the same preacher said he “‘met 
a man layin’ in the gutter.”’ No man can be 
judged by a single sentence, and the man who 
on Lyndonville Camp Ground exhorted the 
“salt of the earth to rise and gird on its armor” 
might have been influenced by his Hymnal, 
‘Forward! flock of Jesus, 
Salt of all the earth, 


Till each yearning purpose 
Spring to glorious birth.” 


A military command addressed to salt which 
follows a shepherd may (acting upon its yearn- 
ings) induce it to make a flying leap imto ob- 
stetrics. But that is poetic license. In plain 
prose some degree of unfitness must be sus- 
pected in the man who said from a rural 
pulpit, ““When rich men can git great fortunes, 
shall that great Creature, the Creator, ask in 
vain for a cent for missions?” Or in the pastor 
who, in preaching about the power of Jesus in 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 83 


healing those who were “‘sick with divers 
diseases,’ said, “Some doctors can cure those 
that have got the measles and set a broken 
bone, and they can cure consumption and 
operate for cancer, but only Jesus could ever 
cure those that had the divers! On one occa- 
sion I was nearly convulsed by hearing the 
preacher (who had read “‘they shall scour you 
in synagogue’) make reference to “Beezlebub, 
the prince of devils.” 

When a bishop stops all business at the 
report of the registrar of examinations, calls 
together the entire class of undergraduates (all 
rural pastors), and lectures them severely on 
the duty of attending to their studies it is 
significant. But I would not have you think 
by this gossipy chat about the stark ignorance 
of some dunces and the neglected studies of 
others that more general education would 
make things wholly right. We want something 
more fundamental than that. Entirely apart 
from the degree of their culture we want great 
minds in the country pulpit. During their 
sermons we want no sapeatense Pope writing 
in his hymn book, 


“Gracious God, 
What have I done to merit such a rod, 
That all this shot of dullness now should be, 
From this, thy blunderbuss, discharged on me?”’ 


84 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


The man without catholicity of mind and 
sympathies will do just what thousands of our 
rural preachers are doing. He will show an 
intense but narrow and sharp-cornered zeal for 
some nonessential which fascinates his peculiar 
self, but which, when over-preached, 1s worse 
than nothing. Or, taking some essential doc- 
trine, he will preach it to the exclusion of 
everything else, often himself losing the spirit 
of that very doctrine. Sanctification, as Bishop 
Fowler said, becomes cranktification. (Once— 
in a country store I sold tobacco for a wholly 
sanctified man.) The sweet gospel becomes 
bitter. The friends of one minister told of 
him with pride that all his preaching was 
“raking the church members over the coals.” 
This is a fault that may be overdone. I heard 
a minister defend his unkindly preaching thus: 
“I wouldn’t give a cent for a sermon that 
doesn’t get somebody mad.” Well, the man 
of the world who gets right down carnally 
mad can give the church an everlasting letting 
alone; but what about these poor folk who 
have loved it from their cradle days? Isn’t 
there a kinder way of correcting their faults 
than to lash their hurt hearts over the altar 
rail? They may have failed sadly to measure 
up to the pastor’s ideals; they may have crossed 
him (probably without knowing it); they may 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 85 


have hurt the cause by their “‘cussedness”’; 
but does this minister know how hard they 
have tried, how much more “cussedness” they 
have conquered than ever they manifest? 
Some folks have their automobiles and their 
millions, but these poor people have looked 
forward all the week to their chief joy—the 
Sabbath day. They are tired, lonely, disap- 
pointed; they have come to church to be encour- 
aged; and it is inexpressibly sad for them to be 
slapped in the face, for them to be hurt hard 
in God’s own house by the one man who ought 
to understand and love them. This is not 
fiction. No man has spent his life in the coun- 
try church without hearing the barbed arrow’s 
whiz. Personal thrusts in vengeance for wrongs 
that were not mtended are often made from 
the pulpit. (I am judging from the fact that 
they have been boasted of afterward.) And 
there are hurts of other sorts. An ungifted 
woman told her scholarly pastor that she liked 
the sermons but could not quite understand 
them. She was informed that a minister could 
furnish sermons but couldn’t be expected to 
furnish brains with which to comprehend them. 
It was very true, but was it very kind? 

The rural ministry, with noble exceptions, 
has another fatal defect. It would be hard to 
call these men lazy, but they are not masterly. 


86 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


They fall into the customs, they go through 
the routine, they do the expected and the easy 
things. But with no energetic precision of far- 
seeing wisdom do they plan a statesmanlike 
program of construction; with no unrelenting 
will do they execute what plans they have. 
Instead of driving all the powers of their souls 
under whip and rein, like fleet horses of a 
charioteer thundering round the circle of the 
Coliseum, these men let their energies amble 
along like old mares in green fodder. They 
are not imperial with determination such as 
made iron old Andrew Jackson cry, “By the 
Eternal I will!’ Why does not every country 
pastor know that he can make himself master 
of the destinies of man as Napoleon never was? 
He is neck and neck with naked human nature 
more than any other man that lives. Special- 
ists in fiction say that (with the possible excep- 
tion of the newspaper man) the country minister 
has the unrivaled opportunity of the ages to 
write great fiction, if the gift be in him, because 
no other man lives so close to human nature. 
Certainly his city brother does not. He may 
know men because of special insight or early 
opportunity, but the restraints of city society 
cover up primeval nature—it is hard to get 
close to it. I am not saying this myself—I 
am quoting it from men who have spent their 


THE LABOR OF HERCULES 87 


lives in city pastorates. A man may be cap- 
tured in the country who could not even be 
besieged in the city. The cities rule the na- 
tion, and with eighty per cent of the dominant 
men of the cities coming down from the prov- 
inces, the country ministry, if it only knew 
it, could make itself supreme over the destinies 
of the world. Rural hands might clutch the 
throttle and turn the switches of human life. 
But what are these men doing? Though the 
night 1s coming when no man can work, they 
go down the days that are swifter than a 
weaver’s shuttle, half idly and all at ease. A 
man official in a great denomination who visits 
hundreds of rural parsonages every year told 
me this: “More and more I believe that things 
come to the men who go after them. Thou- 
sands upon thousands of our men are just 
sitting idly on their jobs domg only what they 
must, and it is too bad, too bad!” 

I do not say that every country minister has 
all these faults. Many are gloriously free from 
any of them. The world is waking. The new 
morning is near. But, deny them who will, 
these things are still too true. I: have known 
a wide range of rural churches intimately from 
my babyhood, and I know whereof I speak. 

If those rural pastors of heroic nature who 
are doing right now the magnificent work we 


88 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


sigh for, think they are slurred by these pessi- 
misms their eyes are holden. How could I 
more recognize their handicap than by point- 
ing out the slight which is put upon their 
work by the general, though unconscious, 
assumption that their Herculean field is merely 
the apprentice shop, the infirmary, the waste- 
basket? 


DESPISED AND REJECTED OF MEN 


Why were such things ever possible at all? 
Why? Listen, folk! And hear it, O God! 

Five words of Scripture will answer the 
question. We have not an adequate ministry, 
you say, because of madequate support? In 
its place I will discuss that, if you ask me. 
I do not want to daub my theme with it now, 
for the cause runs far deeper than that. There 
is an underlying cause, stronger than gravita- 
tion, fatal as foreordination, sadder than death. 
Like Jesus of Nazareth, the rural church, the 
rural life is everywhere “‘despised and rejected 
of men.” 


“Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles, 

Miles on miles 

On the solitary pastures where our sheep 
Half asleep 

Tinkle homeward thro’ the twilight, stray or stop 
As they crop— 

Was the site once of a city great and gay. 
(So they say).” 


Tinkling home in the gloaming among the 
ruins, Browning’s sheep remind us of our own 
lonely pastures. Never, indeed, from those 
pastures can be taken the smile of God’s sun- 

89 


90 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


light—either the burst of golden dawn, the 
blue abyss of noon, or the haunting afterglow 
—but as a center of human interest those 
pastures are sad pictures of the past. They 
are forever being forsaken. They have been 
the playground for baby feet, they have 
brought each hopeful son to a strong youth— 


“But he locked upon the city, every side, 
Far and wide, 
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades’ 
Colonnades, 
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts—and then, 
All the men!” 


And down to those cities and men he went, 
and he never came back. Tf he had business 
ambitions, the city was the mart where he 
must be. If he would excel in law, in the 
cities sat the courts. If he would be literary, 
there were the centers of publication. If he 
would be an artist of any kind, better any 
Bohemian garret in the din of a dirty city than 
all the garnet and gold of the autumn moun- 
tains where God’s blue heaven shines. Has 
he married a wife? He can give her a sweeter 
home in the glittering city than he could on 
some country hillside where the moon shines 
on miles of silver fog that fills the valley. The 
youth wants an education—away to the city 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 91 


he goes, and he never comes back. For this 
he has the best of reasons—so have they all 
—but the fact remains that no matter what 
a radiance his life might have thrown on the 
hills of his home, he never comes back. 

Never denying that this exodus is natural, 
we ask at last, Is it inevitable? Is there a 
defluency among men as in mountain waters 
so that one must go down to the city as the 
other runs down to the sea? Is it economic 
foreordination? Is all pleading for young men 
of great ambition to devote themselves to the 
country church just like pleading the pleasures 
and advantages of childhood? While you argue 
the case the child, predestined, grows to a man 
and the only way to stop it is to have him dead. 

No, that is not quite the conclusion here. 
Is not man king enough to make his choices 
in so little a matter as location? He chooses 
and is gone. 

The sputtering pen will never break the force 
of social and industrial gravitation, if such it 
is, and spitting against the hurricane is not 
one of my sports. But I know how the old 
minister felt who cried out in the pulpit: “This 
sermon will not change your conduct one whit 
and I know it, but it will do this good—before 
God here is a protest! I have freed my soul!’ 
When, in watching the eternal cityward exodus, 


92 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


I cannot help seeing that rural preachers are 
fain to lead it, I ask, Why? 

The answer is perfectly plain. They despise 
and reject these poor rural charges as a field 
for their life-work. Ministers would not for- 
ever leave them for “greener pastures’ if they 
had ever known what it was to love them 
supremely. 

The country church is Pygmalion’s marble 
woman. She will never live till a great heart 
loves her. The love will be a part of his soul, 
not merely his baggage check to a bigger 
charge. <A city preacher, laboring under the 
impression that his friend was serving the 
largest charge (so called) which ever had been 
offered him, urged him to take special courses 
in some university to see if he could not fit 
himself for a “broader life’ and not have to 
stay in little ““Pumpkinton.” He said, “Your 
people love you in this little place, of course; 
but you would find people to love you in 
better (!) places.”’ But leave aside the thought 
of the love you receive. What of the love you 
give? The man who redeems the country 
church must, on one chosen spot, love it 
mightily and for many years. 

Then, too, if the pastor gives to some little 
place the kind of love which alone can glorify 
it, he will not be able to transfer his affections 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 93 


too often, too easily. Does a man leave a 
woman who loves him just because other 
women, perhaps fairer, will love him equally 
well when he finds them? Yes, he does, but 
he who does it is not the man who is keeping 
the faith. It is different, you say, with pastor 
and people? A pastor is so abounding full 
of Christian love that he loves everybody 
supremely, and it makes no difference where 
he is located? Don’t fool yourself. It may 
make no difference where the creature is, but 
a big lot of this paraded semi-infinity of love 
is mere shallowness and utter lack of the same. 


Please don’t bring my way any of that love . 


which is mine merely because it is everybody’s. 
I shall know you were never in the deeps of 
love. If you say that is the way God loves, 
the answer is twofold. First, you are not God; 
secondly, you are not right, for “He calleth his 
own sheep by name and leadeth them out.” 
Until you love your people for their own sake, 
and because they are your own and not an- 
other’s, you do not love them. Two girls were 
in a quarrel. “TI don’t love you a bit!” 

“Oh, yes, you do!” was the answer, “for you 
are a Christian.”’ 

“Well,” said the first, “I love you in a church 
way, but that is all!’’ 

So long as you love your people only in the 


; 
; 
5 


94 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


ordinary church way, you may “whoop it up” 
behind the pulpit all you please, you will not 
save them from their sins. And you will not 
fool them. 

When I say that country life is despised, I 
do not mean that people are hostile to it; 
they simply look upon it as inferior. They 
do not even feel interest enough to hate us— 
they pass us by as never worth their tarrying. 
Hear this, from the Boston Globe: 


In the rural States of Indiana, Vermont, and Maine, 
the census figures declare that people live considerably 
longer than in large urban communities. Well, is mere 
length of life a proper measure of one’s usefulness, and 
is it a guaranty of contentment? We believe that the 
publication of the census figures will not turn a single 
man back from the throbbing centers to those stagnant 
rural districts where some people who hold the original 
patent rights on narrow-mindedness live to be very old. 


Vermonters read the Globe; there is that much 
excuse for this opinion that we are pinch- 
_brained; but whether it 1s right or wrong, we 
are held up to contempt. 

In the presence of two bishops, a divinity 
school, and the rectors of the Protestant Epis- 
copal diocese of a great State I referfed to the 
rural church as despised and rejected by the 
ministry. A prosperous city rector afterward 
challenged the statement. “Certainly I do not 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 95 


despise the country church,” he said. ‘Why, 
every summer I preach four Sundays in a 
rural church during my vacation. Of course 
nobody could expect me to leave my city work 
and give my whole time to such a church.” 
This was a God-sent challenge, for it gave me 
the chance to answer: “What you say, just 
exactly as you say it, is the supreme example 
and perfect expression of just exactly what I 
mean when I say the country church is despised 
and rejected of men. We are the apprentice 
appointments of the young, the retiring ‘easy’ 
task of the old; we are smiled upon and con- 
descended to in their leisure by the great, but 
they do not think us worthy of their life-work.” 

We have too much self-respect to care that 
a man should sit afar and emit inanity like 
the editor of the Globe, or that he should play 
smiling Jove like the condescending rector. 
Let the alien despise us; but the bitterly pa- 
thetic thing about the country church is that 
our own shepherds despise our folds and pas- 
tures. In all my own ministry I have never 
seen the least reason to doubt the absolute 
truth and general application of -what C. O. 
Gill, after ten years of special investigation, 
reports in: The Country Church: 


THE COUNTRY MINISTER NEEDS A MORE LASTING INTER- 
EST IN THE COUNTRY PARISH. In Windsor and Tompkins 


96 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Counties the average country minister does not regard 
his task as permanent, but, rather, as a temporary stop- 
ping-place on the road toward a larger church. The 
value and significance of the service open to him as a 
country minister often escapes him, and the success he 
seeks lies elsewhere. Among the acquaintances of a 
single person were fifteen ministers of one denomination 
in Tompkins County, all of whom admitted they were 
not in their present field to stay. Another resident of 
the same county testifies that in more than thirty years 
he has never known a minister of a small parish in that 
region who regarded it as his permanent work. 


What can such facts mean but that the 
ministers really look down upon rural work as 
beneath them? Where are the men who love 
it as Father Damien loved his leper islanders, 
as Grenfell loves Labrador? It is a safe con- 
clusion that no man will greatly help what 
he sincerely despises. Whatever sacrifices it 
involves, there are ways by which any minister 
who really loves the rural work can stay in it. 
But most rural ministers, having their choice, 
would leave it. I have known many who with 
some degree of content are in the country 
places to stay as long as they live, but from 
nearly all these I have heard the unmistakable 
hint that it is from necessity. The lonely 
pastures are despised by their own shepherds. 
And what is the result? 

When a man falls in love with a new sweet- 


eS ee ee 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 97 


heart he is absent-minded toward the old. 
She may be in his presence, but she does not 
have all his thoughts, nor much of his love. The 
country church is the discarded sweetheart. This 
thmg I have known to happen: A beautiful wo- 
man, of faultless dress and high ideals, became a 
vile, immoral slattern without even beauty of 
face, just because she was despised and rejected 
by the man to whom she gave her heart. Her 
experience is a parable of the rural church, de- 
spised and rejected by her ambitious transients. 
To the imaginative this word is sufficient. 

But here, for the practical, is the result in 
terms of fact. Pastors hoping to be “‘pro- 
moted”’ to better charges (!) stead of making 
their own such, do not take up the duty of evan. 
gelizing their communities to the utmost limits 
as if their life-work lay in those single com- 
munities, in which case their future success 
would hinge on their present effort. Within 
narrower limits, these pastors do the more 
visibly successful things; such things as will 
soonest advance them from the place which 
they cannot redeem, because they are too 
busy getting ready to leave it with most 
worldly advantage to themselves. Doing such 
things, however petty, as may stick out like 
goiters in the church reports, they are not 
Herculean among the God-forsaken borders; 


98 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


much less do they command forth into the 
byways and hedges the hundreds of unused 
church members whom it takes all their time 
to coddle. The work of both pastor and people 
is confined, like that of a fraternal order, to 
their own and those whom they may receive 
most easily. I once remarked that rural pas- 
tors did not care much for that outlying un- 
evangelized ground dependent upon them or 
nobody. I was answered by a man who had 
just retired from six years of aggressive super- 
intendency on a great rural district, “They do 
not care a hoot about it!’ Yesterday morning 
I was told of bright-eyed intellectual young 
people in rural glens within one mile of an 
urban village church who had never seen the 
interior of God’s house. Are there too few 
candidates for the ministry? Why? Let me 
say it again: Because the ones most likely to 
be called, the supreme, gigantic souls, if once 
they were called, inhabit to-day these same 
outlandish glens and mountains. Jesus of 
Nazareth passeth by and they sit blind on the 
lone Jericho road, for nobody has told them. 
Pastors look upon rural appointments as be- 
neath them. That is not the worst of it. 
While they are still serving those rural appoint- 
ments, within just a few miles of their manses 
are the mightiest born leaders of the Christian 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 99 


Church; but they will stay unconverted until 
they die, because their pastors do not care. 
Their eyes are otherwheres. Decades of suc- 
cessive short pastorates in this spirit leave the 
rural borders as the Rev. W. R. Davenport 
describes them in the official publications of the 
Vermont Conference Sustentation Society. Did 
I say the rural field was like a lovely woman be- 
come an immoral slattern because despised and 
forsaken? Hf you will not take it at my word, 
take it from these “‘Sustentation”’ statistics: 


The conditions in many rural sections of the State are 
forbidding. The papers have recently told of an instance 
not many miles from one of our most prosperous villages 
where a lad of a dozen years had never heard of Jesus 
Christ. The writer, when visiting the schools of which 
he was superintendent some years since, found a fairly 
intelligent boy a dozen years old who had not only never 
been to church but had never seen a store. These are 
probably extreme cases, but the religious destitution and 
practical paganism of some communities, especially of 
places between towns, often a sort of no man’s parish, 
are appallmg. It is only when investigation is made 
that the facts are disclosed. And not a little of the 
recent crime in our State has come, not from the cities 
and growing villages, but from the sparsely settled sections 
where the children are never found in a Sunday school. 


These conditions in turn react upon the 
churches which they surround. This is inev- 
itable. Quoting again from the same source I 


100 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


find, following the names of twenty-five repre- 
sentative rural churches, this result: 


In 1878 these 25 churches had 2,650 members and pro- 
bationers; in 1888, 2,503; in 1898, 1,732; in 1908, 1,243. 
Thus it will be seen that these 25 representative Vermont 
Conference rural churches lost 1,407 members and pro- 
bationers within the past thirty years, a net loss of 53 
per cent of the entire membership. The same ratio of 
decrease would leave us without a church member in 
all that section twenty-eight years from now. 


In the very next words Mr. Davenport 
proves by statistics that the decline is not due 
to loss of population, though there has been a 
slight decrease. 

(Since quoting these reports by Mr. Daven- 
port, I have myself found in a two-room graded 
school a lad of eleven years*who found in his 
school book a reference to~the cross. When 
he asked what “the cross’” meant the teacher 
told him of the crucifixion of Jesus. “What! 
Did they tack him on, same as you tack pictures 
on the wall?” he asked with interest. Being told, 
his next question was, “Did he die?”’ This boy 
lived within stone’s throw of a rural church.) 

The Herculean rural task is beyond all puny 
men who feel that success and honor are in 
forsaking it. But the rural preachers are not 
alone to blame for this spirit. How often have 
I heard those who have attained prominent 


SS ——_— ee > ss od i 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 101 


city pulpits toss some poor brother aside as 
unworthy of consideration, with the remark, 
“Oh, he is up at *? —-no matter where; so 
long as it is a humble country place, the last 
word about him has been said. If those who 
have taken what they are pleased to consider 
the more honorable place have no call to 
serve on lonely pastures themselves, will they 
not, for God’s sake, hold their peace when 
tempted to discourage by such language those 
who will never serve elsewhere? 

Bliss Carman, the greatest poet alive on the 
globe, tells 





“How almost no one understands 
The unworldliness that art demands! 
How few have courage to retain 
Through years of doubtful stress and strain 
The resolute and lonely will 
To follow beauty, to fulfill 
The dreams of their prophetic youth 
And pay the utmost price of truth! 
How few have nerve enough to keep 
The trail, and thread the dark and steep 
By the lone lightning-flash that falls 
Through sullen murky intervals! 
How many faint of heart must choose 
The steady lantern for their use, 
And never, without fear of Fate, 
Be daring, generous, and great!’”! 


1Used by permission of L. C. Page & Company (Inc.), 
publishers. 


102 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


If sometimes it is hard for inspired artists 
and poets to leave that work which would 
make them easily popular and soon rich, for 
the sake of their high immortal dreams, for 
which only ten men in a generation will care, 
it is not easier for the pastor to go up the steep 
by the lone lightning-flash when he knows he 
is despised (even if loved) by his inferiors 
whose obvious success he too could easily have 
surpassed in their own kind, if he had not, like 
a shepherd, given his life for the sheep— 
instead of saying to them, “Is this all your 
fleece? Thank you! Good-by!’ For now and 
then a man is on the lonely pastures because 
he is great enough to choose it so, and God 
has need of him there. 

As for those who made the scramble to be 
out of the country church as soon as possible, 
the cause alleged is, of course (though not in 
just these frank words), that one so mighty 
must needs (for the glory of God) go away to 
a larger field where there will be a greater 
scope for his powers. There are two reasons 
why this talk is not pleasant. 

First, it is too egotistical. Not that I think 
my mentioning it will make any difference. 
Hardly. A person is exposed to measles, sick- 
ens, erupts, recovers. But conceit is constitu- 
tional and incurable. I may have mistaken 


ES oe 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 103 


. the nature and extent of your abilities? Possi- 
bly. But if you think you are too smart for 
the country church, you have said “Amen” in 
the wrong place. I do not care who you are; 
if you are any less person than Jesus Christ 
himself; if you are Moses, Saint Paul, Michel- 
angelo, Shakespeare, or Napoleon, you have not 
got brains enough for this country job, this 
herding of cattle upon a thousand hills. You 
may be specially adapted by nature and train- 
ing for the work of a great city or suburban 
church, specially unadapted for the work of the 
great open country; but that is not what we 
are talking about. To say that a man should 
leave the country church for a sphere adequate 
to his powers is too much like looking forward 
pleasantly to the time when one hopes to be 
acting chairman of the Holy Trinity. 

Next, such talk is not only egotistical; it is 
false. Not intentionally so, of course. But 
we who, in spite of our boasted freedom, are 
the predestined from within; whose all-com- 
pelling emotions keep a little servitor whom we 
name Reason, and by whom we suppose our- 
selves to be guided; we can easily get that little 
servitor to justify as truth whatever looms as 
desideratum, whereupon we believe that he 
whom we unconsciously have persuaded is per- 
suading our consciousness. ‘Therefore whoever 


104 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


in his heart despises as small the work of a 
shepherd on lonely pastures can easily justify 
by reasoning a contempt which is ridiculous. 
It is none the less true that he is beneath that 
which he despises. He has. aimed his con- 
tempt at the heavens. : 

“But their eyes were holden.” Blind as bats 
are all those who despise the opportunity of 
the rural church! With strong confidence in 
the truth of what I say, I maintain that the 
country pastorate is an unrivaled opportunity 
for the success of able men who stick to the 
plow. By success I do not mean attainment 
of money or fame, though I want to make it 
perfectly plain that I believe these will come 
to the rural pastor who knows his business as 
soon as to any urban pastor; by success I mean 
a deep, abiding, vital, and imperial power over 
the lives of great numbers of men. By the 
man who sticks to the plow I do not mean 
the man who does his best for a few years in 
a humble place and then is “promoted”’ to a 
more “eminent pulpit.”” I mean the man who, 
to say nothing of consecration, has vision 
enough, yea, politic craft enough, resolutely to 
put aside every temptation to go forth and 
conquer the world; faithfully to labor long 
years unmoved from his humble place till the 
“mountain comes to Mohammed.’ Such a 





DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 105 


man knows that the foreordinations of God 
are sure. He is predestined from within. 
No conventionality in the mobs of man, no 
fatality of the stars in their courses can keep 
away from him any fame, any power, any 
reward which is inherently his. Such a man 
can afford at first to be misunderstood by his 
inferiors in more noted pulpits. He smiles at 
their untranquil ambitions (when he does not 
forget them), and is unmoved by their silly, 
unchristian grading of preachers. He does not 
ask to be given a greater charge which already 
is made; he is great enough to make one for 
himself out of the hulking primeval elements 
that lie at his feet. Like Him that cometh 
from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah, 
this man speaketh in righteousness, mighty to 
save. And when I speak of the country church 
as an opportunity for able men I do not mean 
men that are merely bright, well educated, and 
above the average in mental power; I mean 
the man who in politics would have been 
elected to the United States Senate from the 
minority party and without a dollar of wealth; 
I mean the ablest man who a few years hence 
will be consecrated bishop; I mean the man 
who, had he been a Roman Catholic priest, 
might have hoped some day to sit on the 
throne of the Vatican. 


106 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


All the antecedent conditions of the coun- 
try pastorate favor the triumph of this Lanfranc 
of the mountains. Have you never observed 
that, when an able, popular pastor leaves a 


church, his humbly gifted successor has a hard - 


time? Or that, coming after a dull preacher 
of unsocial nature, a great-hearted, eloquent, 
brainy man has a thundering success? 


*“Rest after weariness, 
Crown after cross,” 


is sure to make its impression on any com- 
munity. And this latter case, pictured in indi- 
vidual instances, is on a colossal scale true of 
the whole country church. The nature of the 
ordinary rural ministry gives invincible advan- 
tage to the really great man who will devote 
his life to the rural work. Our men go from 
the country pulpit to great urban successes. 
Had they stayed, their successes would have 
been greater still. For the country church has 
suffered universally and constantly from a 
shifting, feeble pastorate. 

The saints are thinly peppered over the 
rural pews, and if once in a great while some 
of them are cranky with unchristian foibles, 
feeble and inefficient in business organization, 
discouraged, or unevangelistic, what encour- 
agement have they ever had to be otherwise, 





DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 107 


in the fleeting changes of visionless leadership? 
Is the rural ministry flitting and insufficient? 
Do great areas of oblivion girdle every parish? 
Is the rural pulpit itself despised and rejected 
by “the sacred profession”? So be it, but 
every drear catalogue of fatal defects will but 
show more radiantly the opportunity of the 
rural pastorate by the same argument which 
distinguishes the style of Christ, the a fortiori 
—the “how much more.” If with so defective 
a ministry and organization the country church 
can be the power it now is, to what almighti- 
ness would it not attain if gigantic genius 
should commonly devote its lifelong service to 
rural reorganization. Because of the ambitions 
of the able and the defects of the feeble, the 
country pastorate is always shifting—is one long 
succession of experiments with greenhorns or | 
worse. If under these conditions, with no. 
possibility of the one thing it supremely needs 
—a, continuous policy—the country church not 
only lives, but sends forth the workers of the 
Christian world, what barrier could limit its 
triumphant influence if it could command for 
many years in fixed locations the pastoral 
services of men able to sway the General Con- 
ference? It is a bugle call to any man born 
for a splendid career. One church so com- 
manded would shine through all the nation to 


108 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


the undying encouragement of the country 
ministry. Yea, all their eyes are holden who 
despise the country church as an opportunity 
for the most gifted minister that lives. Does 
not the fact shine forth like Orion that if such 
a man should choose the rural field and stay 
in wt, his success would loom colossal athwart 
the great background of failure? Would not 
the greatness of his dominion be inevitable 
as the tides, the sunrise, the darkness, and 
death? 

One winter twilight I was walking with a 
man who all his life had been pastor of great 
city churches, often at three thousand dollars 
a year, back when dollars had value. New- 
buryport, Boston, San Francisco; Portland, 
Oregon, and a church across the street from 
the capitol at Denver—these had been the 
places of his service. Sadly he said, ““O that 
I had grown up in the country! If a man has 
ability in the country work, he is distinguished 
among his fellows. I have had big churches, 
but I am nobody—lost among multitudes just 
hke me.’ So it is, and so it shall be. Carry 
your candle to the bonfire and nobody will 
look at it; light it in the mountain glens of 
midnight and it is seen afar. No eye can fail 
to see a leading “kindly light amid the encir- 
cling gloom.” It is because of the weird 





DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 109 


darkness of the background that the faces on 
Rembrandt’s canvas shine in such vivid relief. 

What will solve the rural problem? There is 
no such thing, never was, never will be. A 
problem may be worked out in steady pro- 
gression until you write “Q. E. D.,” and it is 
Ended: Living things forever change, never 
end. This thing is a matter of life. Out from 
it the successive problems will chase each other 
forever, endless as the rolling surf, recurrent as 
night. No man or board of men will ever say, 
write, or do anything that will “solve the 
problem.” They can only inspire men, each 
in his own place, to be in themselves and their 
labors a fit answer to the demands which will 
change before you can describe them. 

But there is a sure redemption for every 
rural church. There never will be any other. 
The lone redeemer is an adequate minister. 
Men may sit at their office desks in cities or 
colleges and write rural solutions. Church 
boards may send down their richest programs, 
backed by generous money. Specialists may 
make thorough surveys. Local societies may 
build the finest parish houses to compete with 
or supplant the moving pictures, and to do all 
kinds of social work. What matter? If there 
is not an adequate minister in charge, the 
whole process is a colossal joke; the bigger the 


110 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


program, the more ridiculous it is. If there is 
an adequate pastor in charge, he will see what 
are the needs of his church before you can get 
your mouth open to tell him, and his way of 
accomplishment will be wiser than all extra- 
neous advice. All these other things are good 
—but the man Is supreme and lone. He 1s the 
only need. All the others are so incidental 
and so dependent on him that the only effort 
for the betterment of the rural church which 
was ever worth the making is the effort to 
secure consecrated, gigantic men for a con- 
tinuous rural pastorate. The careers of such 
men would be useful, triumphant, and happy, 
beyond all urban success, beyond all imag- 
ination. 

Still, preachers will continue to forsake the 
country church at the call of ambition. But 
their eyes are holden. The old fanatic in The 
Prince and the Pawper whispers the secret that 
he has had the awful dignity of Archangel 
conferred upon him, and has seen the Deity 
face to face. Then, after pausing to give his 
words effect, he adds, “Yes, I am an archangel; 
a mere archangel! I that might have been 
Pope!’ His kind are with us. They will all 
admit the divine dignity of being shepherd on 
lonely pastures, the sanctity of self-effacing 
service; but, after all, it is tedious business 


_ . . 
Seal eS lle 


DESPISED, REJECTED OF MEN 111 


being only an archangel when one might have 
been Pope. They desire to be among the 
mighty in the church. But even from the 
most selfish standpoint of ecclesiastical ambi- 
tion their eyes are holden who despise the rural 
church. Fame and influence depend on the 
man, not on his location. A man’s fame fits 
him like his underclothes. If it is too small, 
it will stretch. If too large, it will do as Uncle 
Hiram said of the blue overalls, “Oh, they'll 
pucker up in the wash.” Whatever fame a 
man has is at last no more nor less than would 
have been his anywhere on the sod. It may 
be differently disposed. A man in the city 
may be known to more people; he is less to 
those who know him. It is the difference be- 
tween so much water in a barrel or in a puddle. 
In the puddle it shows off better, it is sooner 
drunk up by the sun. The country preacher 
does not dry up. He becomes an unforgettable 
tradition of a more unchanging place—though 
mutation is everywhere. But I do not mean 
that his fame and influence shall be confined 
to his parish. There are so few great men 
who for a whole lifetime give themselves with 
consecutive statesmanship to the rural church 
that no fate whatever can keep down from his 
almightiness the genius who does it. I insist 
upon it that here as nowhere else it is true, 


112 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


“He that loseth his life shall save it.” I will 
not believe our Lord was talking nonsense. 
“He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” 
I am not yet far enough from the dreams of 
my youth to believe that a man’s greatness 
rests on anything but his genius and his loy- 
alty, plant him by whatever lone mountain you 
will. I cannot forget that when Scotland 
remembers her shining apostle, it is Columba of 
lonely Iona; when the black race honors its 
redeemer, it is Lincoln of the backwoods; when 
Gladstone wanted the right man for the canonry 
of Westminster Abbey, it was Kingsley of 
Eversley; when Wesley sought the one man who 
could be his successor, it was Fletcher of 
Madeley; and the man who gives a patriot’s 
love and a statesman’s vision to the redemp- 
tion of the rural work can be elected bishop 
in the Church of God from the humblest 
appointment within her borders. 

And he will be great enough not to desire it. 





THE PICTURE OF PASTOR X 


Tue gloaming fell on Drew Forest. My 
lecture was over in the school of the prophets. 
Dr. Edwin L. Earp said, “I should like to 
hear you speak on this theme, What are the 
necessary qualifications of a rural pastor?” 
Instantly I recognized the most significant of 
all themes touching the country church. Went- 
worth’s Algebra, the yellow old book with 
warts on the cover, used to teach us that x 
stood for the unknown. Doubtless the ideal 
minister is still Pastor X. But the question 
raised that spring evening on the campus at 
Madison makes me want to imagine him—the 
pastor I should like to be. Let us think, then, 
on the only proposition that is of any impor- 
tance at all to the “‘country church problem” 
——as it shouldn’t be called: “What elements are 
necessary in a rural pastor? What qualities 
within him foreordain his success, the absence 
of which will doom his failure?” 

In this article we shall consider’ those qual- 
ities which relate primarily to his office as 
preacher and pastor; in another those which 
relate more to his spirit and personality. I 
have already made it clear that the rural pastor 

113 


114 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


needs to be a man of large intellect. He must 
also have: 

1. A wide variety of intellectual interests. 
The rural pastorate must be long enough to 
develop policies covering many years, and the 
preacher must not be monotonous or narrowed 
to a few themes only. But length of pastorate 
is not the reason for demanding variety; it is 
not merely a question of the bottomless barrel. 
In the heart of the city are many churches, 
ten or fifty. Doctor Blossom is a _ poetical 
preacher and little else; no matter, out of all 
the city he gets a full house of his kind. Those 


who do not like it can go elsewhere. Doctor, 


Firebrand, of Theatre Row, is very sensational. 
It does no harm—those who do not like it 
may go elsewhere. Doctor Psychologicus likes 
to preach on the “Teleological Significance of 
our Subconscious Psychoses,”’ and it is all 
right; out of all the urban ant hill he will have 
his audience. Doctor Ephemeron is strong on 
topics of the day, Doctor Antiquarian on his- 
tory. It does not matter what predominates 
over the mind of any city pastor, he will always 
find enough of his kind to fill a church if he 
is in a city. What is still more important, the 
people who do not like his kind of preaching 
can surely find a place to go where they can 
be fed with what they can digest. But if the 


ee ee 


THE PICTURE OF PASTOR X 115 


rural pastor who has solitary charge of the 
whole countryside should be narrow in his 
interests or have but a few themes or tones, 
he soon has a small and classified audience. 
The fatal thing about it is that the sheep of 
his pasture have no other green grass. The 
rural preacher must be able to minister to all 
varieties the human mind can take. He must 
be able to forage far afield from his own natural 
hobbies. 

2. Imagination in large degree is necessary to 
the country pastor. Life is real, not academic, 
to folks who live close to nature and work 
with their hands. They do not care for ab- 
stract thinking. They may be as intellectual 
as their city brothers, probably would average 
to be more so, but the man who interests them 
in his preaching must put things with pic- 
turesque reality, vividly and concretely. Their 
own thinking is so. Hang your pictures on the 
walls of the soul and folks will look at them 
long after you are done speaking. Illustrative 
preaching is the first to grip, the last to be 
forgotten. When you were told that it was 
ninety-three million miles to the sun, you 
merely thought, “A long way—guess I won’t 
go!’ but you were astounded at such distance 
when you knew that an express train traveling 
day and night without stop would reach the 


116 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


earth to-night if it had started from the sun 
the day Elizabeth took the throne of England; 
that a babe with an arm long enough to reach 
the sun would die past eighty before he could 
feel the burn by nerve-transmission. Early in 
the war someone spoke of a billion dollars, and 
it didn’t mean much to us till we learned that 
there had not been a billion minutes since 
Christ was born. A minister told his congre- 
gation that the Christian population of the 
world was five hundred and fifty millions. 
They sat listless, imitating Homer. Then he 
made his facts alive and they listened. “Such 
an army of men marching single file past the 
door of the church, without rest day or night, 
would take forty-two years to pass; if stood 
in single file out into space, they would reach 
one hundred and seventy-eight thousand miles 
more than the distance from the earth to the 
moon.” 


“If your Honor wad but permit me,” said 


old Edie Ochiltree to the Earl of Glenallan in 
The Antiquary, “auld Elspeth’s like some of 
the ancient ruined strengths and castles that 
ane sees amang the hills. There are mony 
parts of her mind that appear, as I may say, 
laid waste and decayed, but then there’s parts 
that look the steever, and the stronger, and the 
grander, because they are rising just like frag- 





THE PICTURE OF PASTOR X 117 


ments amang the ruins o’ the rest. She’s an 
awful woman.” It was pure imaginative 
description. 

I remember speaking at the funeral of 
Maria V. Duke, one hundred and two years 
old. To moralize on the length of her life 
would have been dull, but there was a fascina- 
tion in thinking that when our aged friend 
was born, King George III was still to have 
three years on the throne of England. It was 
the year when Madison gave way to Monroe. 
Only four Presidents had ruled our country and 
not a President since Andrew Johnson was 
then born. ‘There were only nineteen States 
in the Union, not one west of Indiana. Scott 
and Byron were in the height of their fame. 
Wordsworth, Campbell, Shelley, Southey, Cole- 
ridge, and De Quincey were in mid-career. 
John Keats had not published his first book, 
and Charles Kingsley was not born. Among 
the little eight-year-old boys of the day were 
Charles Darwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, Alfred Tennyson, William E. 
Gladstone, and Abraham Lincoln. Browning 
and Dickens were only five; Thackeray was 
six. Mrs. Duke was nine years old when 
Adams and Jefferson died; ten years old when 
the first railroad in America was laid; twenty- 
nine years old when the Mexican War broke 


118 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


eut; and Napoleon had gone to Saint Helena 
only two years before she was born. So one 
finds imagination useful even at a funeral. 
You have only to watch your older audience 
while you are preaching in an illustrative 
manner to the children, to learn how imagina- 
tive presentation of truth grips the heart. It 
is especially true of rural people whose think- 
ing 1s pictorial and concrete. Most of the 
words of Jesus which survive are of this kind. 
Jesus was a rural-minded minister. 

3. The rural minister must have power over 
primal emotions of man. ‘These are still not 
only dominant but evident in rural life. Camou- 
flage and artifice do not disguise them. Neigh- 
bors know their neighbors, and the pastor knows 
them all, the very heart. With endless variety 
of intellect and beauty of imagination one 
might preach, yet fail to move and grip and 
direct these forces of emotional power so that 
they result in acts of will. It is possible to 
be a highly entertaining rural preacher without 
rousing a passion for the kingdom of God and 
directing it into activity. The sharpest rebuke 
I ever received was given one Sunday morning 
by an old man who meant me a kindness. 
“T’ve been highly entertained this morning,” 
he said. I forgave him, and later I buried him, 
but I never forgot him. ‘There were no con- 





THE PICTURE OF PASTOR X_ 119 


verts that morning. Preaching must not only 
start the machinery of rural thought and emo- 
tion till it runs like the engine of the auto- 
mobile; the clutch must be thrown in, so that 
there may be goings. “Let us go against 
Philip” is the test of oratory. 

4. The rural preacher must be evangelistic. 
There is no way to keep a country church alive 
without the evangelistic tone in the pulpit and 
the evangelistic spirit in personal interviews. 
So often I have seen it transform a rural 
church. 

I was not twenty-two years old when m 
May in tlie first year of my pastorate in little 
Glover our Epworth League signed pledges, 
each person by persistent effort to seek to 
bring five persons to Christ within a year. 
There was no plan or thought about special 
evangelistic meetings. But in October of that 
year we had to begin a series which lasted for 
seven weeks. Strong sinners were transformed. 
There were twenty-nine adult accessions to the 
little church. On two successive Sundays I 
baptized as many as could stand at the chancel. 

In Plainfield I gave out some cards entitled 
‘Personal Worker’s Pledge,”’ the legend whereon 
was this: ‘““With God’s help I will try my best 
to lead two unconverted persons to Christ in 
this present year. I will pray for them every 


120 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


day and will work for their conversion until 
it comes.” If they cared to do so, I asked 
my people to write on the back of this card 
the names of those for whom they chose to 
be evangelists. This was to be in strict con- 
fidence, but it was done so that I might better 
know how to help them. I asked that no 
one choose to seek more than two souls (or 
three at most), so that there might be a per- 
fectly definite effort. The pledges were signed 
and returned to me. There was no public 
announcement, no demonstration. The cur- 
rents of prayer were rolling toward the great 
deep. It was in the midst of a political cam- 
paign, myself to be the elected candidate (by 
nomination from my own church), but we 
gave it no attention. The Almighty could 
manage that. Our citizenship was celestial. 
We were hounds of heaven on the trail. The 
house of God was crowded at the November 
communion. The altar rails were not long 
enough to hold one soul more than was bap- 
tized that morning. Seven times the altars 
were filled for the sacrament of the Lord’s 
Supper. Vivid with reality were the words, 
‘Therefore with angels and archangels, and 
with all the company of heaven, we laud and 
magnify thy glorious name, evermore praising 


thee, and saying, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God 





> 


THE PICTURE OF PASTOR X_ 121 


of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy 
glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord most high! 
Amen.” 

5. Another need of the country pastor—you 
may laugh if you wish, I do not know how else 
to say it—is an almost hypnotic power of psy- 
chological suggestion. Some men have this to 
a remarkable degree. Modern advertising uses 
it with great skill. Some ideas are strangely 
vital. They grow like weeds. The mind is 
fertile soil to him who knows how to use it. 
We educate by direct suggestion what we can, 
but that is not what I mean here. Find the 
thought that is germinal. It may be one wholly 
incidental (so it seems, but you know better) 
to the main purpose. Drop it in some fertile 
cranny of the mind that another man would 
not have recognized at all. Subconsciously, in 
the night as dreams are made, it will grow and 
bear fruit. ‘ Lives can be made or marred by 
this power. Such vital thoughts, dropped inci- 
dentally, have grown to bless me. One of 
them, in William Black’s Life of Goldsmith, has 
taught me to look to my work, not to public 
opinion. “It is not what is written about 
books that makes their destiny, it is what is 
written in them.” One weed-growing thought 
carelessly dropped by an elderly friend has 
maimed me, “And you know a man’s friend- 


122 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


ships are formed before he is forty.” I speak 
truly when I say if now I meet a man who 
is past that age, I find myself confident that 
he will never receive me into intimate friend- 
ship. It is an unconscious barrier—it is 
foolish, I admit—but a weed-growing thought 
got caught in my soil—I wish it had been a 
better seed. The power of conversationally 
suggesting dominant thoughts is of great 
importance in the country. There are not 
so many distractions, amusements, varieties 
of brazen challenge to the attention as in the 
city. Country thoughts run deep, strong, 
unchecked. They ride like Jehu furiously on- 
ward. I have seen rural people absolutely 
obsessed. Sometimes it is by their neighbors. 
Sometimes it is by their fears. I knew a poor 
unbalanced fellow who thought each year that 
he had some new fatal disease. He once went 
to the physician, pulled off his shirt and asked 
the doctor to hunt for germs on his back. 
Vital evil thoughts had overgrown his sanity 
with nothing to counteract them. 

Such power of suggestion requires great sym- 
pathy. Magnetize your man. Go into his 
soul with him. Throb with his thoughts. Lead 
him to your will. You will be surprised at 
your power. I was sent by the State Board 
of Education to reverse the policy of a very 





THE PICTURE OF PASTOR X_ 123 


determined principal of a State school. I was 
the listener. With all sympathy I led him 
over the long trail of his talk. In sly moments 
when he did not know it, I got my plan before 
him in a wholly incidental way which I seemed 
to forget while emphasizing other things. At 
last he, seeming not to realize at all that I had 
suggested it, made the proposition as his own. 
I hesitated. He argued for it until he was 
convinced, then I consented, on behalf of the 
Board of Education, to allow him to introduce 
the policy I was sent to enforce. He thought 
it was his own. 

Rural pastoral visits are sometimes long. 
If they have any importance more than that 
of passing social pleasure, there are certain 
principles which should never be ignored. 

1. Do not often blame. If you know a soul 
is guilty, lead him where he can feel the rebuke 
of God heavily as need be, but it is dangerous 
to assume to be the messenger of that rebuke. 
Above all things never assume that misfortune 
is a punishment of sin. Remember Jesus and 
the tower of Siloam. Remember Job. When 
he was in utter misery his friends thought, 
“Surely Job has sinned.” God knew what 
they meant to do, so he sent a dream on pur- 
pose to restrain them, to make them stay at 
home and mind their own business. The voice 


124 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


of a terrible spirit had said, “Shall mortal man” 
(that is, shall you, Eliphaz) “be more just than 
God?’’—more ready with condemnation? Like 
all hardened hearts, Eliphaz thought the ser- 
mon fitted somebody else, and ran to trouble 
Job with the very dream by which God tried 
to command him to keep his mouth shut. 
Let us almost never blame—I do not say never, 
for I have been guilty. There was a man 
whose reenacted program was to be converted, 
to get wholly sanctified, to have the “latter 
rain,’ then to live again in a “backslidden 
state.” His wife did not enjoy religion—at least 
not his. But the time came when, torn with 
cancer and near the grave, she longed to find 
God. Her husband was selfishly coddling his 
own feelings in a “backslidden state.” I tried 
every gentle means I could to bring him where 
he could comfort her. Finally I said to him: 


“This is the last time I shall ever ask you. . 


I have tried to bring you to God, and you 
know the road. I have talked with you, I have 
prayed with you. Your wife is dying and 
wants to find God, and you will not help her; 
it is the wickedest thing I ever knew; if you 
let her die without helping her to God, I shall 
believe you are a damned soul; I shall never 


invite you to God, I shall never pray for you — 


again.” 





THE PICTURE OF PASTOR X_ 125 


2. Never minimize the sorrows of another. A 
lecturer, Dr. Roland Grant, defended Job’s 
wife somewhat in this way: If Job’s wife had 
said, “O well, Job, cheer up! This isn’t so 
bad as it might be. You might have had more 
boils,” Job would have looked’sourly over his 
topography and snarled, ‘“‘Where?’? When she 
said, “Poor Job! God is hard on you; there 
couldn’t be one more boil on your poor body!” 
then of course Job said, “O yes! right there 
under the elbow is room! See?” If Mrs. Job 
had said, “Job, be thankful for the blessings 
you have enjoyed, and think how much worse 
off you might be,” Job might or might not 
have cursed God, but he would have been 
sorely tempted to curse Mrs. Job, after which 
he would have nursed his miseries in proud 
sulkiness. But Mrs. Job is wise in comfort. 
“Curse God and die!’ she says. She paints 
Job’s woe as unbearable, very well knowing 
that his whole soul will rally in defense of 
God’s goodness and in patience with his lot. 
However it was with Job, anyone who goes 
to a person in affliction and tries to cheer him 
up by asking him to think how much worse 
things might be has said the worst thing he 
could say, except one—and that is, “Think 
how many people are so much worse off!” 
The afflicted will not receive the comfort, but 


126 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


he will spontaneously dislike the comforter, 
for he thinks him (in most cases rightly) un- 
sympathetic. Suffer with your people to the 
deeps of grief. Never minimize their sorrows. 

3. Always encourage full self-expression, what- 
ever it be. It°may be confession, it may be 
pouring out of sorrows, it may be just talk. 
Whatever it is, the place where we begin with 
any doctrine of ours is the place where self- 
expression ends in the other man. ‘Try it 
earlier and your effort will be tossed back 
futile on the flood of his unburdening. These 
burdened hearts must unload. They must have 
their talk out in their Protestant confessional. 
Many a problem is solved in stating it. Many 
a grief is comforted in the telling. Many a 
man tells what a fine visit he had with his 
friend, but doesn’t remember that himself did 
the talking. After full self-expression, if there 
is anything we should say, God will tell us, 
but the best comfort we give is given when 
we let some poor soul lay his burdens on us, 
just as we lay our sins on Jesus. 





KNIGHTS OF THE FAR COUNTRY — 


On the green walls of my study hangs a 
water-color painting of Iona Cathedral. There 
is a soft radiance of golden sunlight on its 
ancient stone tower and walls. There is a 
white sail far out on the blue background of 
ocean. My lady of the manse, who painted 
the picture, has by its presence like a sacra- 
ment every day turned my memory to Saint 
Columba, lonely apostle of ancient Scotland. 
Then, with Columba of Iona, I see in imag- 
ination, one after another, those Knights of 
the Far Country who, turning their backs on 
cities and kingdoms which they might have 
conquered, gave themselves to live and die for 
humble folks in lonely places. Theirs is the 
supreme chivalry. I see Father Serra treading 
the lone reaches of El Camino Real from San 
Diego to the Golden Gate. I see Father 
Damien giving himself to die among leper 
islanders, while the poet Tabb writes of him: 


“O God, the cleanest offering 
Of tainted earth below, 
Unblushing to thy feet we bring, 
A leper white as snow.’”! 


‘Used by permission of Small, Maynard & Company, Inc., 
publishers. 
127 


128 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


I see Grenfell among the fishermen who face 
death every year on the Labrador. I see the 
saintly John Fletcher, mighty-minded and de- 
scended from earldoms, burning out his bright 
life in the wretched village of Madeley. Loom- 
ing with Washington I see Francis Asbury, now 
revered as a mighty bishop in the Church of 
God, then riding the desolate reaches as a lone 
pioneer in the utmost rural wilds of the world. 
I see him fording the rapid rivers full of toss- 
ing ice; braving the itch and the Indians; ach- 
ing with fever; counting in delirium beyond the 
Allegheny Mountains the fancied houses where 
no houses would stand for fifty years to come. 
He had no home but the saddle and the pulpit. 
For forty-five years he rode five and six thou- 
sand miles a year—more than two hundred and 
fifty thousand miles, more than ten times the 
distance around the circumference of the world. 
Our bishops are mighty in labors. There are 
William F. Anderson in Boston; Luther B. 
Wilson in New York; Adna Leonard in Buffalo; 
Francis J. McConnell in Pittsburgh; Joseph F. 
Berry in Philadelphia; William F. McDowell in 
Washington; Wilbur P. Thirkield m Chatta- 
nooga, and Ernest G. Richardson in Atlanta. 
Up and down through the territories of all these 
men; twenty to eighty-four times into every 
State; sixty times across the Allegheny Moun- 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 129 


tains, rode the lonely Francis Asbury on horse- 
back, “crossing the last mountain, stemming the 
last river, to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to 
the last man”—riding “‘O’er moor and fen, o’er 
crag and torrent, till the night” was done. 
I see John Frederick Oberlin, lone and im- 
mortal among the blue Alsatian Mountains. 
He has turned his back on cities and honors 
to find in the bitter poverty of the desolate 
Vosges the places where he can be most use- 
ful. There are no schoolhouses, and the people 
will not build them; so this man of God builds 
them out of his own pitiful pay. There is no 
bridge across the mountain torrent, no road to 
civilization through the wild forest, and the 
people cannot be persuaded to make them- 
selves a highway. So John Frederick Oberlin 
shoulders his pick and begins work with his 
own hands till the people follow him and the 
road is made. The agricultural reforms which 
he cannot teach otherwise he demonstrates in 
his own orchards and gardens.  Ridiculed, 
hated, threatened with personal violence by 
his own people; braving suspicion from without 
because of his pastoral loyalty during the 
French Revolution, he marches right on. For 
more than sixty years in that remote mountain 
parish, the sick, the poor, the wretched, the 
wicked are sheltered in his great love until, 


130 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


honored by his nation and decorated with the 
gold medal of the Legion of Honor by the 
king of France, he dies among a transfigured 
people that love him. His name is now revered 
by the Church of God to the ends of the earth. 
Such are the Knights of the Far Country. 
The King of kings is their Overlord. They 
are brave in the battle, not fearing oblivion. 
They ride forth, not asking reward. They are 
chivalrous to save the helpless and forsaken. 
These are they who have gone forth on lonely 
pastures to be pastors among God’s poor. 

The spirit of these Knights of God is the 
same that must transfigure the personality of 
the modern rural pastor. What outstanding 
characteristics must that personality show? 

If, first of all, I say absolute wheteness of 
soul, holiness of character, you will think I 
am not speaking to the point, for that, you 
will say, is also a prime essential of the city 
pastor. Still I do want to insist that, im a 
manner beyond its application to the city 
pastor, any lapse in the rural pastor is fatal. 
In spirit and in essential righteousness there 
is no difference. In influence by circumstance 
there is a chasm. Little faults, or perchance 
foibles, in the personal life of a preacher may 
in the semi-incognito of a great city pass un- 
known or uncared for by his people. But out 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 131 


in the hills interests are few and intense and 
human nature is stark naked and unashamed, 
Also everybody is encyclopedic about his 
neighbor’s business. The rural eye is eerily 
photographic, the rural light is vividly strong, 
and the rural tongue has one quality in com- 
mon both with the wind and with every one 
born of the Spirit, for it “‘bloweth where it 
listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof.” 
Just now I am not resenting country gossip; 
I am recognizing an inevitable result of strong 
personal interest at close range, but it is easy 
to see what this will do to the man whose 
life is not up to the high and narrow standards 
set for him by folks who know him like a 
brother. 

Benvenuto Cellini, through some optical illu- 
sion, after intermitting his sensuality with 
saintliness, believed that he had acquired a 
halo easily visible to the human eye, but he 
admitted that his halo could be observed more 
clearly in France than in Italy, which was his 
home. Home halos are best; radiance of holi- 
ness the brighter as we are the better known. 
If any man aspires to the divine dignity of 
being a pastor in the Church of God, in its 
most intimate relation, which is the rural 
appointment, he must be pure in heart, or 
his wall is Belshazzar’s and the finger is writ- 

! 


132 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


ing. The reactions of his conscience must be 
instantaneous as flashes of lightning, foreor- 
daining and stronger than steel. Numbers of 
men and women have wagered their faith on 
his. He is the. nearest vision his people will 
ever have of how God is holy. 

Behind the Old Brick Manse where I have 
lived for fourteen years is a great apple tree. 
One night in May I looked out upon it when 
it was in full blossom. The heavens were 
black and starless, the clouds were low, the 
very air was inky and blank. One thing alone 
IY could see, for a strong Mazda light in a 
window shone full on that white apple tree 
and brought it out in radiant relief, vivid and 
ethereal, against the thick darkness of night, 
whiter than Easter lilies, whiter than snow. 
This 1s a black old world at best and the souls 
of its priests ought to stand out radiant in 
the light of Christ, against the black darkness 
of sin, whiter than Easter lilies, whiter than 
snow. 

Great and tender patience must characterize 
the rural pastor. ‘The city pastor too,” you 
say. Yes, it is one of many elements there, 
but It is supreme and strategic here, for there 
are three things which I insist we must never 
forget: the great intimacy of rural relation- 
ships, the great relative importance of the 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY = 133 


single rural individual, and the Indianlike 
tenacity of human beings in remembering any 
slight or wrong, real or fancied. The rural 
pastor who would not thwart his own work has 
patience which suffereth long and is kind. 
People will be slow and stubborn; a man may 
feel that they are insultmg him, when they do 
not so intend; and sometimes the real, unmis- 
takable insult will come. But absolutely never 
must the pastor’s patience break or bend. 
Even if he must be severe, it must be in per- 
fect self-control, without shadow of impatience. 
Patience wins. Loving patience, putting its 
own imagination into the point of view of 
that other heart, avoids many a bitter regret. 
A man of national reputation in education told 
me that one girl in his college classes stirred 
his temper almost beyond control. He never 
asked her a question without seeing that she 
was whispering with her seatmate, even while 
he was talking to her. Just before the time 
when, deciding he would endure it no longer, 
he was about to give her a scathing public 
rebuke, he had occasion to visit her home. 
There he learned that the poor girl was so 
deaf that she could not hear her teacher’s 
questions. Watching her face closely she saw 
when the question was addressed to herself 
and inquired of her seatmate what it was, 


134 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


that she might answer. To be patient a little 
longer was better than to break an innocent 
heart. A boy im a country school was very 
dull and absent-minded. At length his teacher 
learned that he- was an orphan whose only 
remaining relative, an uncle to whom he was 
much devoted, had just died; and the woman 
with whom the child boarded said that every 
morning his pillow was wet with tears. To 
wait a little longer was better for that teacher 
than to discourage a broken-hearted boy. It 
is not otherwise with the pastor. Loving 
patience will lead to intimacy which will reveal 
the reason of all things. The kindest and most 
encouraging church member I ever knew was 
one whom at first acquaintance I dreaded and 
thought the most disagreeably critical. There 
was in my church an elderly woman (now in 
her grave) whom I had much disliked. I got 
the notion, on good grounds, I believed, that 
she was opposed to me and my work. I 
dreaded her. At length in a little circle where 
Christians were thanking God for their bless- 
ings this woman said, while her tears ran down, 
that the greatest blessing the year had brought 
to her was the return of their dear pastor. 
I felt like the old Roman in the first Latin 
book, who returned home and was met by his 
dog with. bleeding fangs. He rushed into the 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 135 


house and found the cradle empty. He ran 
his sword through the dog. Then in a closet 
he found his baby, safe and sleeping, near the 
mangled, dead body of a wolf. It is always 
better to be patient a little longer. 

So far I have illustrated by those instances 
where the offense was imagined, for nine tenths 
of the cases are such. Not sentimental like 
these, now comes that other case, hard and 
unbeautitul, the real offense. This too must 
be tranquilly faced. Only those who under- 
stand the dominant individuality, the primal 
and lasting emotions of country life, can under- 
stand these two things: first, how big a rock 
is dropped into the stream of rural life, to 
make its cascade forever, by any lapse in 
long-suffering patience; and, next, how the 
influence of a pastor depends on “peace, like 
a river,” attending his way down the stream 
of rural relationships. 

And do not think that you will go unde- 
fended because you are not hot in your own 
defense. An old man (now dead, more’s the 
pity, for I needed him!) sat down in the chair 
of a Plainfield barber and made a disagreeable 
remark about the pastor. The barber stopped 
his work, looked down into the lathered face 
and said, “If I couldn’t say anything good 
about the best friend this community ever had, 


1386 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Pd keep my old mouth shut!’ Be a mountain, 
serene above the clouds, and good laymen and 
worldly folk with a command of language will 
make all the storm that is necessary. 

No man need -hope for success in the coun- 
try church without a rich sense of humor. 
Tan Maclaren believed that this should be a 
part of any minister’s examination for ordina- 
tion. ‘The humorous side of the country pas- 
torate is worth its own chapter elsewhere, so 
here it will simply be said that the use of a 
sense of humor is not to afford amusement out 
of the abundant material at hand, and cer- 
tainly not to make fun of the folk of the flock, 
but to save nerve frazzle and to give that sense 
of detachment which will prevent us from 
taking ourselves and our superficial troubles too 
seriously. 

A fourth requisite is genuine love for country 
people and rural scenery. Poor, unschooled, 
and provincial some rural folks may be (are 
those in the city less so?); spontaneously near 
to nature they certainly are; but unless a man 
loves them and is one among them, he need 
not tarry. If with foreign missionary attitude 
and with his heart in the city, some transitory 
pastor tries to uplift them, he comes into bad 
odor more surely than if he walked the back 
pasture on a moonless night when skunks were 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 1387 


in blossom. The pastor who feels that his 
rural location cuts him off from advantages 
of the city is not rural at heart. Are the 
cafion-streeted cities full of opportunity, glare, 
and joy? The rural-hearted man knows these 
things as well as any man, and can even 
endure the city’s advantages for a few days 
at a time. But all which the city can offer 
is forgotten in the advantages, tremendously 
more sublime, of living in the landscape. 
Would not I be an ass to choose narrow walls 
and call it opportunity? My mountains are 
blue as violets beyond the green hills; white 
lilies float on the sky-blue waters, and the 
gardens and forests are bright with emerald 
green, and sea green, and yellow green, and 
olive green and evergreen. And God comes 
down in October and splashes the forest with 
daffodil yellow and blood till the leaves fall 
and rustle over the vividly green hillocks of 
moss. I remember a woodland glade where 
rocks and fallen logs and standing tree trunks 
were all covered with green velvet, radiant 
with the sunset. I have heard harps of pine 
moaning to the winds of morning. I have 
heard the Aurora Borealis swishing eerily m 
the midnight, its great streams of white light 
flashing past the zenith all fringed with rain- 
bow colors. Lighting the world in an ink- 


138 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


black midnight, I once saw a bright blue 
meteor bigger than the full moon racing across 
the heavens till it burst into a thousand frag- 
ments and drenched the night with darkness. 
Once I saw the full moon reflected as in a 
mirror by the cloud just beneath it. I have 
seen the world blue with leaping lightning while 
God rolled his thunders between the moun- 
tains. Falling all day with a million thin lines 
down the spaces, I have heard the rain patter- 
ing on the roof and have seen it rolling in 
coffee-brown rivulets down the road. Yellow 
in the sunlight as the streets in the city of 
God, I have seen a pasture hill a thousand 
feet high and completely covered with waving 
goldenrod. I have seen incredible gold and 
crimson in the sunsets, followed sometimes by 
afterglow skies, radiant, ethereal and vividly 
green. I have seen the world buried in new 
snow which burdened the spruces, covered 
every twig with shining frost, and glistened on 
the fields like white linen dotted with dia- 
monds. The afternoon shadows upon it are 
blue as the waters of a mountain lake, and 
sunset turns the new-fallen snow to miles on 
miles of rose-tint and amethyst. And when 
the long, wonderful winter is over, April comes 
and we hear the robin, the crow, the frog, and 
the bishop. 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 139 


“Go watch by brimming river 

Or reedy-marged lagoon 

The wild geese row their galley 
Across the rising moon, 

That comes up like a bubble 
Out of the black fir-trees, 

And ask what mind invented 
Such miracles as these.’”! 

So says Bliss Carman—so say we all. Can 
any city give us the piping frogs in the April 
twilight, the hermit thrush, the whippoorwill, 
or the golden robin? I missed Galli-Curci in 
Chicago, but I heard the song sparrow at home. 
O the fragrances of the open country—lilacs, 
new-mown hay, balsam trees, stacks of mur- 
dered lumber, wind off the fields of blooming 
clover, white daisies, or yellow kale in green 
waving barley! All these things the true 
rural heart will love till he would not surrender 
them for any wealth of the world. Chickens, 
calves, cabbages, and cats—good are these, 
and those who live among them. Selah. 

Face to face we clash with the fads of the 
day when we mention the word, but without 
otherworldliness it is better not to enter the 
rural pulpit. Practical, a man of human na- 
ture and common sense, the country pastor 
must be, but that is not all. With novel airs 


From Songs from a Northern Garden. Used by permission 
of L. E. Page & Company, publishers.. 


140 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


of modernity and omniscience we are told to 
think less of the golden streets of heaven and 
more of making good streets in our own vil- 
lage. There may have been a time when such 
remarks were original and useful, but they have 
been stale a long time. The mold on them is 
as long as a cat’s whiskers. A man whose 
congregation wouldn’t congregate advertised in 
the newspapers that he didn’t preach other- 
worldliness. Anybody, without genius, or heart, 
or imagination, can preach the dull didactics 
of this world, but deep down under our worldly 
exteriors we are men of sorrows and acquainted 
with grief. Temporal clatter is not enough. 
Our feet are “slipping o’er the brink,” “our 
days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” we 
shoot into the dim mystery of eternity with 
hearts aching for assurance of that kingdom 
beyond the stars. 

John Wesley is an old man. When the Old 
Guard of the French army faced Wellington at 
Waterloo it had tramped the battlefields of 
Europe for twenty years; but for half a cen- 
tury this man who faces the congregation at 
Bolton has preached the Gospel of Peace down 
the valleys of England. He gives out the 
hymn: 

“Come, O thou Traveler unknown, 
Whom still I hold, but cannot see;” 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 141 


but as he reads the next two lines an anguish 
of memory comes. Ingham, Hervey, De- 
Lamotte, the friends of his youth, are gone; 
the bones of Whitefield are at rest across the 
- Atlantic; Fletcher of Madeley is in his grave; 
and Charles Wesley, who wrote this very hymn, 
has been buried fourteen days. 


“My company before is gone, 
And I am left alone with thee!”’ 


At these words the wavering voice breaks— 
white-haired Wesley sits down weeping behind 
the pulpit and buries his face in his hands. 

If loneliness overcame the triumphant old 
-servant of God in the midst of his imspiring 
task, what can it not do among the lonely 
homes in the remote countryside where the 
people are not, like Wesley, mighty in faith, 
and where the task is dull monotony? One 
week in winter I rode through eighty miles 
of snow, preaching the Word, burying the dead. 
Could I judge the heartache of the mourner 
other than by my own? I once hoped my 
younger brother would be my companion in 
the ministry. Long ago on the last night of 
the old year I saw him die. Once [I had a 
blue-eyed baby. I leaned over her little basket 
one morning and kissed her—and found that 
she was dead. Once I had a dear father. 


142 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


When he was broken in body and mind on the 
cross of disease, I leaned over the counter of 
a store in Rutland and read the black head- 
lines that told of his tragic death. I have 
waded deep in dismal death. If I could ever 
have a pastor (as I have had to be one since 
IT was eighteen years old) I should want him 
to bring me good news of the far country 
where there is no death, neither sorrow nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain, 
for the former things are passed away. 


“O mine, my golden Zion! 
O lovelier far than gold, 
With laurel-girt battalions, 
And safe victorious fold! 
For thee, O dear, dear country, 
Mine eyes their vigils keep, 
For very love, beholding 
Thy happy name, they weep.” 


Around me too are folks who have fought 
their temptations for twenty years and are not 
victorious yet. Even yet, even for them, is 
Jesus mighty to save? Strong confidence, 
triumphant faith in the invisible world divine 
—without these a man must not be a rural 
pastor, though every steeple falls. Redemption 
from sin through Jesus Christ, immortality, 
heaven, God, the comradeship of the Redeemer 
here and now—there are mountain peaks like 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 143 


these, otherworldly, sublime. The rural church 
does not need those men who sit on ant hills. 

Supreme and independent courage must be 
numbered as the next requisite. Noble is 
William Lloyd Garrison declaring: “I am in 
earnest. I will not equivocate, I will not 
excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I 
will be heard!’ Noble is William of Orange, 
commanding in the face of the foeman, “Break 
down the dykes! Give Holland back to ocean!” 
Noble is Garibaldi, offering his soldiers “hunger 
and cold and weariness, rags, blood, and death”’ 
—ere they follow him to victory. Noble is the 
iron-hearted old Andrew Jackson, one arm 
shattered by a musket ball, grasping a gun 
with the other hand and shouting to his muti- 
neers: “Stand back! By the Eternal Pll shoot 
the first man that dares step from his tracks!” 
Noble is Henley, who sings: 

“Out of the night which covers me, 
Black as the pit from pole to pole, 


I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 


“Tt matters not how strait the gate, 
How charged with punishmént the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate; 
I am the captain of my soul.” 


But nobler are John Frederick Oberlin and 
Fletcher of Madeley, self-crucified on a cross 


144 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


in the shadows; with no egotistic defiance of 
fate; with no exhilarant thrill of standing at 
a supreme moment in the face of the world. 
In the eyes of a nation it must have been 
easy for the Iron Duke on the field of Waterloo 
to cry out: “Stand fast, Old Ninety-fifth! 
Old Ninety-fifth, stand fast! What are they 
saying about us in England to-day?” Bright 
idol of our cursed years of blood, it may have 
been easy for Saint Joan of Arc to die, crying 
out, while ten thousand men were weeping, 
“Yes, my voices were from God, my voices 
have not deceived me.” It may have been 
easy for Master Ridley to “be of good comfort 
and play the man,” knowing that he lighted 
such a candle, by God’s grace, in England as 
shall never be put out. Facing Reginald Fitz- 
Urse and his thugs like a lion at bay, robed in 
the almost royal garments of his archbishopric, 
contending for the high dignity of God's holy 
church, it may have been easy for Thomas a 
Becket to pour his blood before God on the 
floors of Canterbury Cathedral. Torn by the 
wild beasts or flaming in the night gardens of 
Nero, it may have been easy for the early 
Christians to die in triumphant testimony. It 
may have been easy for them to lift high their 
weapons before the throne of ivory and. gold, 
crying, “Cesar, mortturt te salutamus!”? as they 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 145 


went into the arena to die, for they knew that 
ten thousand eyes looked down upon them 
from that amphitheater, and far above the 
_ bloodthirsty Romans, far above Ceesar’s throne 
of ivory and gold, far above the blue spaces of 
heaven they saw 
“The lily beds of virgins, 
The martyrs’ rosy glow, 
The cohort of the fathers 
Who kept the faith below.” 

But it is not easy for a man with the mighty 
ambition that goes with supreme power of 
character to turn his back on the world and 
go to the lone prairie and the mountain to give 
his life to God’s humble poor, through long 
years of misunderstanding and disillusionment, 
far from the challenge of crisis or crowd, know- 
ing that his name will never be heralded till he 
hears it new in the kingdom of God. Oh these” 
are the true Knights of the Far Country. For- 
get your generals! Forget your martyrs! I 
know of but one courage like this. It is the 
courage of the poet. He sends his verse to the 
magazines. No editor wants it if it does not 
fill convenient space with conventional stuff. 
He sends his book to the publisher. It is re- 
jected—gold will not trot on its track. He 
publishes a few volumes himself with scanty 
means wrung from his mountain garden. The 


a 


146 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


critics ignore it, for they do not know. Once 
in a hundred times they choose the good— 
once in a hundred times they doom the bad— 
it is all, and equally, by accident—they do 
not know—they.cannot help it—God did not 
make them so that ever they could know. 
But foreordained by the kingdom of God, the 
great poet is serene. He waits like the moun- 
tains. He sings like the sea. Not for the poor 
honor of sitting in the Vatican or the White 
House would he give up the divine dignity of 
being the least of those immortals, whose 
mighty ones are Milton and Homer and David. 
Far down the dim moonlight of the ages he 
sees a path by which a wiser generation finds 
his house of song. He is kept by the courage 
of believing that his cadences will sing like the 
foaming deep, when the monuments of his 
critics are like the sand on the shore. 

Not otherwise is the courage of the rural 
pastor. It rests on things unseen which are 
eternal. Its goal is far away. At first it is 
not hard. He is young, his comrades of youth 
are like him. By and by these follow the 
fashion. Some of them are famous in the 
cities; they cannot understand that their rural 
brother is not wasting the splendid promise of 
his life. It makes him lonely. Then the older 
relatives who have wanted to see him succeed 


KNIGHTS OF FAR COUNTRY 147 


before they die wonder why he really so fails 
of his promise. The real significance of his 
life is not outwardly evident, for, mind you, 
ii he is the abidingly successful rural pastor, 
he ws not doing the spectacular things now advo- » 
cated by well-meaning people for a rural pastor 
to do. He is running far deeper than these 
things, like rivers of water of life, into their 
immortal souls. And it is not easy to watch 
the cityward trend of your young people, like 
rivers that run to the sea. Forever sowing, 
most of your harvest is another’s. But not 
all, if you abide. Your college classmate will 
go up on the bishop’s platform and you will 
still be in your unfamed rural parish. But 
you will be loved beyond utterance in the 
humble hearts, and God will not forget your 
name beyond the stars. 19 

Good night, dear brothers, shepherds on 
lonely pastures, knights of the Far Country. 
I do not know whether I have told you what 
the true country minister is like—God knows 
I have told you the pastor I should like to be. 
In the glens and mountains there is labor 
enough for me—the only city for which I look 
is the “city which hath foundations, whose 
builder and maker is God.” 


PASTORAL TRAILS 


Lona ago, down pastures that slanted to- 
ward the sunset, I called the cattle home at 
evening. I was a barefooted boy home from 
school and hungry, and, leaning on the bars, I 
watched the cowpaths near me meeting like 
rivers on a map, far away branching wide on 
the green hillside. To-day my pasture is 
metaphorical. Shepherd of a kind then un- 
known to me, I trace the branching trails past 
the homes and into the sorrows of my rural 
folk. Come with me. 


The rural pastor’s work is to befriend and 
influence men, wherever he finds them at the 
sympathetic moment. The most effective pas- 
toral visits are sometimes made on the street 
corners and in the grain fields. I am not — 
under the delusion that I am telling anything 
new. Some time ago a religious paper featured 
the work of certain pastors who visited men in 
the fields and swung pitchforks while they 
talked with laborers at their tasks. This was 
heralded as a new, redeeming vision in the 
rural pastorate. I read with amazement. Did 
not the good editors know that never had the 

148 


PASTORAL TRAILS 149 


rural pastors done otherwise? I cannot re- 
member when this was not common with all 
those who under any circumstances could 
mingle with men. Those who live in the coun- 
try (not as a part of well-planned duty in 
“uplifting” but naturally and inevitably) must 
like, and be like, plain country folks. This 
gossipy casual association is one of the de- 
lights of the pastorate. It certainly gathers 
_ rich folklore and traditions. 

One bright blue afternoon I was pitching on 
a load of hay for a farmer friend. Golden grain 
was waving near, and Spruce Mountain stood 
magnificent above the green woods which ran 
down the Brook Road. The field sloped down 
to a green swale and my friend on the load 
took up his parable: 

“Will Perry, he came over to' mow grass for 
Dan Page once, and it was in that swale, and 
hadn’t swung the scythe three times ’fore he 
said: ‘Gosh, Dan! MHaint ye got no rubber 
boots I could get to wear?’ 

““Why, yes!’ Dan said. ‘You go up to that 
shed and just inside the door to the right 
you'll find my pair. Put ’em on!’ 

“And by and by Will came back kind 0’ 
mumbling and said, ‘I couldn’t find no boots!’ 

“Well, by Gosh, no!’ Dan said, ‘I got ’em 
on myself. Didn’t think of that!” 


150 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


I was going home past the village inn carry- 
ing a loaf of bread when the innkeeper said: 
“IT never see a loaf of bread without thinking 
of a prayer meeting in Topsham when I was a 
boy. The old deacon leading the meeting 
‘spoke of bread as the staff of life, when his 
wife whispered to a neighbor so loud you could 
hear her all over the meeting, ‘’Taters is 
mine!’ After this story the innkeeper’s talk 
drifted to that richest of all mines of rural 
tradition, the red schoolhouse by the road. 
Here the boys played Tag in the summer and 
Fox and Geese in the winter. In the winters 
of auld lang syne the big boys came to school, 
up to the age of twenty-one. This added to 
the interest, if not the effectiveness, of disci- 
pline. One day the man-grown lubbers were 
told that on Friday they must “speak pieces.” 
Not wishing to do this they put their heads 
together and plotted against the day. It came, 
and they were ready. The teacher called the 
name of a pupil nearly six feet tall. He went 
out before the school, made his bow, and spoke: 


“Niagara Falls 
Is wide and deep, 
And it would be a good place 
To wash out sheep.” 


After a profound bow, he took his seat and 


PASTORAL TRAILS 151 


his successor was called forward by the grim 
teacher. His oration also was brief: 


“God made squirrels 

To run on a rail. 

God made puppies 
To catch ’em by the tail.” 


The success of the third was not so dis- 
tinguished. He bowed low and began— 


“When I lays on my little bed—” 


“Take your seat!’ shouted the teacher, and 
the entertainment was over. 

Whenever it rains, one of my townsmen re- 
marks, “Well, I see the brother is busy.”” The 
reference is to a joke he has on me in his story 
of an old presiding elder to whom a widow 
offered the hospitality of her cottage for the 
night. In the morning the preacher asked 
what kindness he might do in return. Now 
the season was very dry and the widow sug- 
gested that he pray for rain to save her gar- 
den. He promised, and rede away. Soon 
there was a cloud-burst which washed all her 
cabbages into the river. She looked out upon 
the ruins and cried “O dear! Those Meth- 
odists always do overdo things so!” 

Such are the enjoyments of casual conversa- 
tion which I mention, not to string story after 
story, but to show the comradeship of the 


152 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


country neighborhood and the homeliness of 
its traditions, sunshot with humor or tender 
with pathos, where one lives again Beside the 
Bonnie Brier Bush or The Heart of Midlothian. 
I would not tell such things to poke fun at 
these country folks, for I am of them, and I 
love them. They are my people, and their 
God is my God. 

How often too is the life and conversation of 
the countryside rich in literary material, or 
deep in religious value! I shall never cease to 
reproach myself because long ago I failed to 
jot down scenes from the conversations of John 
McDonald, a preacher superannuated in my 
first parish, where he used to tell me tradi- 
tions of the fathers in days when the camp 
meeting was in its glory and revivals were 
mighty. 

One of them was of a hard-hearted man who 
openly defied the power of God in a revival 
meeting. In strong, jubilant chorus the con- 
gregation joined, then knelt in impassioned in- 
tercession. ‘The terrified sinner ran like mad 
out of the meeting. It was a rainy night of 
November, but, like Cain fleeing before Je- 
hovah, he ran till in a remote field he knelt in 
the mud and stubble among some ungathered 
stooks of corn. The conviction of sin was 
tearing at his heart. All night in that corn- 


PASTORAL TRAILS 153 


field he wrestled like Jacob with the angel, till 
sin had broken his heart. God forgave his sins, 
just as gray dawn came over the mountains. 

Another story was of a schoolhouse meeting 
which a wicked man tried to break up by 
throwing stones through the windows at the 
old-fashioned lanterns within. It was in the 
edge of the backwoods, but Heaven was mov- 
ing among those rough benches. The wor- 
shipers prayed till suddenly their persecutor 
rushed into their midst asking them to pray 
that his soul might be saved from hell. 

I never shall forget the light in the face of 
that white-bearded old preacher when some- 
times he spoke of the city of God, nor the 
awiulness of his eye when he warned of “‘eter- 
nal burnings.” He told me of a great con- 
course on Lyndonville Camp Ground long ago. 
The sun threw shadows of the leaves over the 
white canvas roof of the great tent, but the 
audience was all aghast with terror at a sermon 
on the text, “There remaineth no more sacri- 
fice for sins.’ Long afterward I remembered 
it with melancholy reflection, for the old man 
was dead, and it was the last week of meetings 
ever to be held on that camp ground. I stood 
on the platform where the fathers had thun- 
dered. The congregation was thin under the 
dimly lighted tent, the great moon rose, blood- 


154 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


red, over the maples, and the camp fires were 
burning to red embers all around us. The 
“faith of our fathers” is “living still,” but 
their works have passed away. 

There is another class of people thinly dot- 
ting the country parish who are rapidly pass- 
ing “into the world of light,’ but who have 
treasures of tradition, when gifted to tell it, 
rich as what Scott gathered in the border bal- 
lads of Scotland. These are the soldiers of the 
sixties, about whom our grandchildren will 
ask, and we cannot tell them. One of these 
would have saved a joke on himself if he had 
told the history of the past instead of eriti- 
cizing the present. (He was not of my parish 
or I would not let you laugh at him.) When 
the rural council gathered in the country store, 
a veteran, jealous of our Sammies in khaki, 
said: “These soldiers now don’t have no such 
hard ,times as we had in the sixties. We had 
nothing to eat but hard tack, but they are 
sending these boys sugar, and coffee, and 
beans, and nice white bread and everything 
good to eat, and now I see they have just got 
some new kind of food. I read yesterday that 
they had sent them pajama.” 

Humor in one, heartache in another. One 
day I met an old soldier coming from the 
cemetery. Through the Civil War he had 


PASTORAL TRAILS 155 


served in the second battery of Vermont 
Light Artillery and was a veteran of Port Hud- 
son. I had heard him tell of the fierce bom- 
bardment when armies dug and burrowed into 
the ground like woodchucks, to be sheltered 
from the shot. This old man was my friend. 
When against the noise and opposition of half 
the town I was trying to put a park in the 
center of our village he helped me set the 
trees and, though very lame, he lugged water 
to them every day to make sure they should 
not die. Once he sent me a card, while en- 
joying the only vacation he had taken for 
years, saying he was having “a grand, good 
time, but would surely come back in time to 
vote” for me. This was volunteered informa- 
tion, for I never talked with men about their 
votes, but the reference was to an election 
which sent me to the Legislature for the sec- 
ond time, and since no other representative 
had been reelected he wanted to make sure 
that I did not fail. 

“Were you going home?” I asked. “If you 
were, I will go with you and we will talk about 
that pension now.” 

He needed that someone should write to 
Senator Dillingham for him. His pension had 
never been adequate and now he was sick and 
old, and nearly blind. 


156 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


“Yes,” he answered, “I’ve been up to the 
graveyard.” ‘Then he broke down and cried. 
Two months ago he had buried his wife. 

We went into the home where he was living 
all alone. Hus son was fighting for his country 
with the American Expeditionary Forces in 
France. 

“I’ve got a letter from the boy,” he said, 
“but I can’t read it. When Emma was here 
she was eyes for me.” 

I read the long and interesting letter to him, 
a letter which showed that the boy did not 
know his mother was dead. I described the 
pictures on the cards it inclosed. Then I un- 
folded the white silk handkerchief embroid- 
ered with lace. A shock went over me. This 
was hard, cruel business, but he would have to 
know. “Can you see this circle of bright 
colors?” I asked. “These yellow points are 
the ends of the flagstaffs. Here is Old Glory 
beside the banner of England, and here is the 
flag of Belgium; this is the flag of France, and 
this is the flag of Italy. They are all draped 
together in the center, and this embroidery in 
old English letters underneath them is—is the 
words “lo my dear Mother.’”’ 

Then the tears of his desolation ran down 
like the rain and the old man whimpered like 


a dog. 
' 


PASTORAL TRAILS 157 
It was Henry Vaughan who 


“Felt through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness,” 


and I too, when comforting my people on the 
last and loneliest trail, have sometimes felt 
strangely, weirdly near that everlasting world. 

I have been out on the hills calling among 
homes when, just as if a strong hand were 
laid on my naked heart, I would be impressed 
that I ought to visit a house perhaps in a dis- 
trict which I was not intending to touch. 
Never have I failed to find that this strange 
tugging at my soul was serious with awful 
meaning. It does not come often, but I have 
more than once obeyed it to the comfort of 
dyimmg men. In one case I did not know the 
man existed till I went at this call. Once I 
disobeyed it. I was a student pastor at South 
Barre, nineteen years old. A deep impression 
clouded me with its very heaviness that I 
ought to visit the home of a Mrs. Wark, a 
woman seemingly perfectly well and the mother 
of a happy family. Dreading at that age to 
do any calling, I postponed it for a week. The 
next Saturday I was coming from school to my 
charge when a South Barre boy leaped from 
his bicycle to the ground beside me. “Any 
news?” I asked him. 


158 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILIS 


His answer stunned its way through my 
heart. “Yes. Hadn’t you heard? Mrs. Wark 
is dead.” 

I do not want to Insist on this thing, but I 
am not the only man in whom [ have wit- 
nessed this experience. When I came to Plain- 
field the Congregational Church was open and 
the Rev. Perrin B. Fisk was pastor, a broad- 
minded, highly educated old man, not given 
to superstitions. In a Sunday-evening union 
service I heard him preach an intensely solemn 
warning of sudden death. He said that he felt 
strangely impelled to preach that sermon. 
Once before he had done so under the same 
compulsion and could not avoid taking the 
hand of a man after service and saying, “I 
wish you would take this sermon to yourself.” 
That man was dead in three days. After tell- 
ing this experience, Mr. Fisk continued, “I do 
not know for whom on this second occasion 
this warning is sent, but I can’t help feeling 
very deeply that there is some man right here 
to-night to whom God sends this last message.” 
That was Sunday evening. Friday afternoon 
a man living twenty rods from the church was 
crushed to death on the railroad. 

A few years ago a physician practicing in 
my parish asked me to ride out under a wooded 
mountain to visit a patient he was trying in 


PASTORAL TRAILS 159 


vam to help. She had hallucinations. She 
knew that she was dead and God would not 
forgive her sins. I went into the room and 
told her that her pastor had come to talk 
with her. With glassy eyes she stared at me 
through the twilight and said that she was 
glad, but I was too late—she was dead and 
God would not forgive her sins. 

“Are you willing to talk with me about it?” 
I asked. 

“Yes,” she answered, eagerly. 

“Then listen hard. Can’t you remember 
when you were sick and feverish and you 
dreamed some awful thing was chasing you 
and you couldn’t move, or the rocks were fall- 
ing on you and you couldn’t move, and it all 
seemed true, but it wasn’t true, and was just a 
bad dream because you were sick? Do you 
remember it?” 

“Yes, it was just that way.” 

“Well now, right now, it is just like that too. 
You are sick and you think you are dead, but 
you are not dead; it is just like a bad dream 
because you are sick.” 7 

A flash of intelligence came into the vacant 
eyes. “Is that the way it is?” she asked. 

“Yes, that is the way it is.” 

“But God will not forgive my sins,” she 
cried in despair. 


160 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Her daughter was by the bedside. ““Do you 
love this girl?” I asked. 

“Yes, she’s my girl.” 

*“When she used to be naughty and you 
whipped her, after she had cried a long time, 
did you forgive her and love her again, or did 
you keep right on punishing her, and never 
let her think you loved her any more?” 

“No, no! She’s my girl!” 

“Of course she is. Now, can’t you under- 
stand that you are God’s girl, just as this girl 
is your girl? Don’t you remember ‘Like as a 
father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth 
them that fear him’? Just as you love your 
girl and forgive her, God loves and forgives 
you.” 

The dull eyes brightened and she asked 
eagerly once more, “Is that the way ut 1s?” 

“Yes, that is the way it is. You have been 
punished long enough, and God will forgive 
now. ‘For a small moment have I forsaken 
thee, but with great mercy will I gather thee.’ 
Do you want me to pray for you?” 

“Yes, I do!” 

The waters had been too deep for me, but I 
went right through. I prayed and found God. 
I prayed not only for healing, but for forgive- 
ness. As sometimes with our consciousness 
and sometimes with our subconsciousness, so, 


PASTORAL TRAILS 161 


for aught I know, we may sometimes with our 
hallucinations know ourselves best. I faced 
straightforwardly toward God and found him 
with the poor troubled soul at my side. Great 
comfort and peace came over her. Her de- 
lusion was gone. She was happy in the full- 
ness of pardon. 

As we rustled home through the October 
leaves I told the doctor, who had not been in 
the room with us. He only said with a smile: 
“Oh, yes! She is all right now, but I know 
her case. The delusion will all be back to- 
morrow, bad as ever.” I did not dispute him. 

That was years ago. I have carefully in- 
quired of the woman’s relatives. Call it by 
whatever coincidence or accident you will, 
from that moment her delusions never returned. 

In July, 1911, on the last afternoon before I 
was to leave for a summer vacation at Hamp- 
ton Beach, I was looking over some manu- 
scripts which it was imperative for me to com- 
plete that day. I was excited at the prospect 
of my first glimpse of the ocean. My parish 
was farther than Greenland from my thoughts. 
I had no further duties to perform in it before 
I leit. Suddenly between me and my papers 
came the thought of a certain man, so vividly, 
so all-consumingly that I could not drive my 
mind to the consciousness of anything else but 


162 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


his image. The man had not once been present 
in my thoughts for months, though he was a 
godless, profane man who never came to 
church. I knew the call full well. Dropping 
my papers I hastened to the man’s home. No 
news had reached me of his illness though I 
had known he was always frail. I found him 
on his deathbed, desiring to repent and give 
his heart to God. I baptized him that day. 
Death followed close on my track. 

I have no words to tell you how direct, how 
intimate, how personal I believe is the com- 
panionship any pastor may have with the 
“Holy Spirit, faithful Guide.” Such expe- 
riences as I have told may not be frequent, 
but the pastoral trails over the loneliest pas- 
ture will be bright with the glory of God, just — 
as really in the common duty as if there were 
a supernatural message for each moment. 

No true pastor feels that he is giving more 
than receiving. In a ministers’ club I told of 
the great help I got for my pulpit ministry by 
visiting my people. In all seriousness a city 
pastor remarked that his experience had been 
that the majority of his parishioners didn’t 
have mentality enough so that any part of 
their conversations could be incorporated into 
his sermons (!). Oh, the poor ninny! 

When I get disgusted with some one of my 


PASTORAL TRAILS 163 


people, when I think he is “cussed” to the 
bone and his funeral would highly adorn the 
sanctuary, then I know it is high time I should 
pay tribute to His Excellency the President of 
the Livery Stable and drive forth seeking in- 
timacy with the abominated brother. To- 
gether we perform a dissertation on the faith 
of our fathers and a degustation of dandelion 
greens. Then, abiding in love, I drive the 
sorrel horse home through the green gloaming. 

When I think it is a hard lot to be a country 
pastor or become discontented through world- 
liness, I take from my pocket a gold Waltham 
watch and think of the friend who owned it 
long ago. We were schoolmates together in 
Montpelier Seminary. Far beyond mine was 
the clearness of his strong mind; far beyond 
mine was the grace God had given him; and 
his chosen work, like mine, was the ministry. 
Keen of thought, clear and eloquent in speech, 
pleasing in person, no young man ever faced a 
more splendid career. Then the white plague 
put its hand upon him, and he went home 
without a murmur to his mountain farm. 

I became his pastor. One Sunday morning 
he asked me to visit him. “What day will you 
come?” he said, and I answered, “I will come 
Thursday.” With joy he turned to his mother: 
“Brother Hewitt is coming Thursday!’ Yes, 


164 SLTEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


that very Thursday I did go—to preach his 
funeral sermon. When his mother was pray- 
ing God to spare the life which was temporal 
she cried, ““O God, save my boy!’ The young 
man heard it and said, “He does save me, 
mother!’ but he spake of things unseen which 
are eternal. Huis last words were, “‘Tell the 
young people I love them and want them to 
come to Jesus.”’ Over his coffin I gave them 
the message, but his message to me was one 
that he never knew he gave. 

It was in the winter before he died. The 
warm snows were thawing in the gray after- 
noon around the little schoolhouse in the edge 
of the woods. Here the young man taught 
school. I was his superintendent as well as 
his pastor, and I was making an official visit. 
It was on a day when I was ambitious and un- 
easy. I was pastor of a church of only seventy- 
four members, in a little country village, and I 
wasn’t getting on in the world at all. For a 
moment I had forgotten that God was letting 
me do the work which had been the dream of 
this splendid young man six years my senior, 
who now could do nothing but teach four 
poor, homespun little children—that was all. 
The school was over, the four pupils had gone, 
I had inspected the register and was ready to 
go—still bitter at the littleness of my oppor- 


PASTORAL TRAILS 165 


tunity, when my friend said: “Brother Hewitt, 
won’t you kneel with me on the floor and ask 
God’s blessing on what I have tried to do 
to-day? I never dare leave the great respon- 
sibility of teaching these children without 
asking God’s blessing.” 

The four little children have changed so that 
I shouldn’t know them, and their teacher has 
been twenty years in his grave, but I have 
never thought of that winter afternoon with- 
out wishing my soul were pure as Vernon 
Clark’s. For he could do the humble task 
“‘with eye single to the glory of God,” happy 
in believing that nothing was greater. Oh, 
how right he was! 

Surely we ought to be at least as devoted as 
the best of those to whom we minister, and 
not less holy than Francis of Assisi was this 
poor man whose story the Rev. Leon Morse, 
of Somersworth, told on Hedding Camp 
Ground: 

“Up in the Green Mountain State there lived 
a Methodist who really loved his church. He 
was a farmer, who, in common with his neigh- 
bors, had to get up at four, or at the latest 
five, o'clock six mornings of the week. But, 
unlike them, every Sunday morning he arose 
at half-past three to do the chores about the 
place, and drove seven miles to church with 


166 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


his family, stayed to Sunday school, and, if 
possible, returned to the evening service. And 
this he did for nearly twenty years, until in a 
new home his Sunday drive was only six miles. 
“The church.was so close to his heart that 
his favorite hymn seemed perfectly natural to 
be repeated anywhere by him, and probably 
no quotation aside from the promises of Holy 
Writ fell from his lips more often than the 
words: 
* ‘T love thy kingdom, Lord, 
The house of thine abode, 
The church our blest Redeemer saved 
With his own precious blood.’ 


“He was a steward in the church. Once the 
vice-principal from an [institution of learning, 
who had been placed on the board of stewards, 
asked what his duties would be. The reply 
was characteristic: ‘My brother, the principal 
duties of a steward in the Methodist Episcopal 
Church are to pay the bills no one else will 
meet.’ He had already proved this statement, 
for, at a fourth Quarterly Conference, when 
there was a deficiency in the minister’s salary 
and the other brethren had decided to let it 
remain unpaid, after all were through talking, 
he arose and said: ‘Brothers, you all know 
that I am not a rich man by any means, but 
our pastor is going to have his salary if I have 


PASTORAL TRAILS 167 


to pay the deficiency myself. It is all wrong 
for a church to be dishonorable in business 
transactions.” That deficiency was met right 
away. 

“There came a time at last when he was 
absent from the church. Sad hearts knew 
why. Friends gathered at the home. The 
minister came, and the words from the text of 
comfort were these: ‘I have fought a good fight, 
I have finished my course, I have kept the 
faith. Stewards of the church stood together 
near the door, and one of them laid a rough 
but most kindly hand on the shoulder of a 
griefstricken youth, and said with trembling 
lips: ‘What shall we do in the church without 
your father?? And the lad replied, between 
choking sobs, ‘I don’t know.’ 

“That scene will never leave my memory. I , 
was that boy. Oh, church of my father and of 
my father’s God! 


‘‘ For her my tears shall fall; 
For her my prayers ascend; 
To her my cares and toils be given; 
Till toils and cares shall end.” 


“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble 
strife’ they spend their fameless days, un- 
haloed saints of the humble home; but when 
storms beat wild on the house of God, blinding 


168 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


even their pastor’s faith, such men stand 
around him like the Rock of Ages. They are 
the true rewards of pastoral labors. 

Long ago in the Holy Land, there were two 
brothers, and the elder said: “I am rich in 
houses and lands and have none to feed but 
myself. My brother is very poor and has 
many mouths to feed. I will go out by night 
and carry my sheaves into his field.” But the 
younger said: ““God has abundantly blessed me 
with many little ones to love, and my brother 
is poor and lonely, and has none but me to 
love him. I will go out by night and carry my 
sheaves into his field.’’ At the far ends of the 
fields they began, and at first neither knew of 
the other’s labor, but at last, in the ight of the 
Harvest Moon one night they met and let fall 
in astonishment their last two sheaves, each at 
the other’s feet. And the legend is that on 
that spot made holy by love the Temple of 
God was built. So the country pastor takes 
to his people his sheaves of labor and love. 
So he meets them bringing their harvest of 
love and labors. On any spot sanctified by 
this interchange of munificence a temple of 
God may rise, its snowy steeple standing high 
among the green hills, its invisible dominion 
reaching beyond the stars. 


BUBBLING OVER 


Nort until you are out of sight, perhaps, for 
IT am writing of the humorous side of the rural 
pastorate. It may appear almost anywhere. 
In the most solemn moment of one of my 
prayer meetings a good old man rose, looked 
me steadily in the eye, and testified that when 
he was young he “was adapted to strong drink.” 
When he had finished I said “‘“Amen,” exerted 
my self-control until I reached home, then 
walked the floor and let myself go. Another 
brother, discussing the question thrice asked of 
Peter, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” 
said, “This was the time when Peter expec- 
torated his sin.”” One of my good church mem- 
bers, reared in Italy, was describing a woman 
brought up in the cloister who later came out 
into civilization and for the first time saw a 
man who did not wear long robes. ““My sake! 
but I was scared. I had never seen a man wid 
pants on before!’ The Rev. F. W. Lewis. 
tells me of a man who suddenly jumped up 
and said, ““As I was settin’ on the thought a 
settee struck me,” and of another man who 
wanted to be, like John the Baptist, “a bright 
and lining shight.’’ But the most ludicrous 

169 


170 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


instance I know is when a half-witted woman 
in northern Vermont, who never knew the 
meaning of the words she used, drawled out, 
“Tf it hadn’t been for the stupidity of God we 
should all have been in hell long ago!’ 

Sometimes it is the minister himself who 
makes the bad break. When I came to Plain- 
field twelve years ago I preached a _ bacca- 
laureate sermon with the rather original and 
startling doctrine that one should do the work 
for which nature fits him. “All. the failures in 
the world,’ I cried, “come from misfits!” If 
I had not forgotten that the most successful 
teacher in attendance was a Miss Fitts I 
should have understood the broad grin which 
ran across the congregation. In pastoral work 
I have done as badly. In the county jail at 
Montpelier I was trying to persuade a French- 
man guilty of murder to take his sins to the 
Lord. Thinking I meant the Hon. William A. 
Lord, attorney for the prosecution, he vehe- 
mently protested, ““Na! Na! Lord, he bad 
lawyer!’ 

Another Frenchman nearly broke up a serv- 
ice for me in Glover, Vermont. He was the 
janitor and the church was overheated. A 
man in the congregation stood on the back of a 
pew to lower a window. The old janitor, 
jealous of his prerogative, jumped up, clapped 





BUBBLING OVER Oe wa | 


both his hands on the hip pockets of the other 
man and wheezed out in a whisper heard dis- 
tinctly all over the church: “You let dat wind’ 
alone! I have feex him all right!” 

A rural minister of English origin drove into 
his yard and leaving his sleigh for a moment 
entered the house, to find his district superin- 
tendent there. After chatting a while he sud- 
denly remembered his unhitched horse and 
said, “Hexcuse me! I must go out to the 
barn and itch!” 

Years ago I called on a man of very talented 
appetite who, after he had shoveled himself 
full during a long meal, suddenly exclaimed, 
without intermitting his efforts in the least, 
“Well, by Gosh (bite), I guess I won’t eat no 
more, by Gosh! (bite) for ie Pil (bite— 
crescendo) blow up!” 

A farmer was suddenly petted from crea- 
tion by the kick of a mule, and one of his 
neighbors called out to another, “Say, did ye 
know Zeke Allen’s dead?” 

“What! Zeke Allen dead? By Gosh, no! 
It’s more’n fifty dollars damage to Zeke to 
die now before he sells them pigs.” 

Speaking of mules, I have been richly 
blessed with the acquaintance of some of the 
crazy little snapity-pop sects who harrow up 
the country side with their eccentricities. One 


172 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


of the “come-outers” labored to rescue me 
from the sin of having a subject for my prayer 
meetings. It was all wrong, he said; “Jesus 
Christ didn’t talk on no subject.” Another of 
their devotees came to my garden as I was 
racing with the twilight picking up potatoes I 
had dug out. A long time he stood and talked 
incessantly. Suddenly a silence fell upon him, 
then he exclaimed, “Why, I don’t know but it 
is the Lord’s will I should help you pick up 
potatoes!” Not willing to deny so wholesome 
a doctrine, I had his help and we soon finished. 
We fed him on onion stew and he unburdened 
his heart. A believer in the miraculous gift of 
tongues, he said they were going to put him 
out of the synagogue because his gift was of 
the devil. He had said “Tic-tic-tic-tic!”? when 
the Spirit came upon him while the others said 
““Toooo-tocoo-tooo!” But he sang them down 
and had the victory. But his gift was of the 
Lord, and there wasn’t anyone sufficiently 
gifted to interpret him, and he rather guessed 
their gifts were all of the Lord up on Maple 
Hill, excepting Tib Holt’s gift of tongues—he 
thought Tib’s gift was of the devil! 

This man, or one of his kind, came down to 
the village to labor with an old and highly 
educated Congregationalist minister who ran 
greedily after the error of Balaam in believing 


BUBBLING OVER 173 


that the world was round and turned over 
every day. These poor little sects go spinning 
their crazy gyrations alone. Out on a desolate 
mountainside among the stumps and bowlders 
with only half a dozen houses in sight, I know 
a spot where two chapels stand four-square 
against each other’s heresy right across the 
road, like Paul withstanding Peter to his face 
because he was to be blamed. One of the in- 
termittent ministers told me that the other 
pastor had closed his church till February be- 
cause one of his hearers had gone down to New 
Hampshire. Thinking strange, I inquired and 
found that there were only two persons in his 
normal congregation and the other sister 
thought the sermons might be too personal. I 
next learned of my reverend informant him- 
self that he was soon to be married. As he was 
past fifty I ventured the opinion that this was 
a matrimonial relapse, or second marriage. 
‘Well, er—yes,” I was told. “Brother T 
now has a wife but he will be married as soon 
as he can get the divorce.” 

These sects have strange doctrinal hobbies, 
and so long as one deports himself strictly on 
the mooted question he may accommodate his 
other conduct in a manner to shame Mark 
Twain’s “sophistical cuss.” The latter cer- 
tainly is distanced in these arguments, too rich 





174 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


to omit, which I cut from the Sheaf, published 
by the Firstfruit Harvesters. The pastor is 
defending his act in marrying divorced people, 
contrary to the rules of his sect. “We pray 
the blessing of the Lord to attend this union. 
There has been some criticism among our peo- 
ple regarding this marriage, and as it is known 
that Sister Martha has been twice married and 
divorced, some of the saints have failed to see 
how I could sanction the marriage by perform- 
ing the ceremony. Her former marriages were 
before she became a Christian. God in his 
Word concerning marriage and divorce, is giv- 
ing instruction to his people, and not to the 
Gentile world. Nevertheless when one is con- 
verted to Christ, they should then commence 
to walk by the same rule. Applying that to 
our sister, the first man she married was her 
husband according to the laws of the land, and 
according to the Word of God. The second 
man was her husband according to the laws 
of the land, but according to the Word of God 
she was living in adultery. When the laws of 
the land divorced her from this man he was 
not her husband any longer in a legal sense 
and according to the Word of God he was 
never her husband. Having repented of her 
sins and being saved through the precious 
blood, and the first man being dead, who was 


BUBBLING OVER 175 


actually her husband, we consider her at per- 
fect liberty to marry, only in the Lord.” When 
I read this I asked myself, if this is marrying 
“only in the Lord,” what would they consider 
as marrying “somewhat in the Devil’’? 

But such eccentricity is not general enough 
to concern us, and the church regards it as a 
certain “holy jumper” was regarded who came 
into one of my cottage prayer meetings in 
Plainfield. He had just fairly begun to hop 
and howl when an unconverted son of the 
household snarled out in loud disgust, “Set 
down, ye old jumpin’ jack! You'll knock the 
lamp off the organ!” 

One of these holy rollers whose exterior was 
very dirty got to shouting in meeting, “I’ve 
been washed whiter than snow!’ <A wag be- 
hind him ealled out, “Say, Pete, there’s a spot 
behind your ear they didn’t hit.” 

In a village church a G. A. R. memorial 
service was held at which the commander of 
the post marched his men up the aisle, two 
abreast, to take seats in the front pews. There 
was so large an attendance that chairs were 
brought which filled half the aisles. The old 
soldiers were to march out before the congre- 
gation broke up and the commander, wishing 
to get his men out in single file but forgetting 
how to give the order, detohished the congre- 


176 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


gation with this acrobatic command, “Atten- 
tion! Forward! Now double up and march 
endways right out through that door.” 

In rural neighborhoods often instead of being 
in charge of 4 professional director, funeral 
services will be conducted by a neighbor of the 
defunct. In one case that I know this office 
fell to a man who knew nothing about it. 
Many were present and he had a hard time 
to manage them. Finally he called out from 
the back door: “Hey, there! You fellows out 
there by the woodpile! If you think you be 
agoing to see these corpse, get a wiggle on you 
and come in here! We ain’t goin’ to keep ‘im 
waiting all day.” 

Sometimes, however, the ludicrous will mix 
with the awful in ghastly manner. While a 
daughter was troubled greatly by the gasps of her 
dying mother I said, “But she isn’t suffering now, 
she isn’t conscious of pain.”” And the answer was, 
“Oh, no, she isn’t conscientious now!” 

The worst instance of this kind I know is 
where a man mortally hurt was reported dead, 
and the family scattered to the kitchen. A 
little later I saw that the man was not dead 
and went out and said to his son, “Your 
father isn’t dead.” “Oh, rats!’ he answered 
in disgust, “‘and I had got it all telephoned 
that he was.” 


BUBBLING OVER 77 


We heard strange things about that time. 
One man tried to tell us about his first wife’s 
father and he got it his “wife’s first father.” 
One man thought the place where he worked 
was heaven, for, he said, ““There is no night in 
heaven and there is precious little up here.” 
One man had a boy working for him who got a 
blow which knocked him over and cut a gash 
in his head. ‘‘Darn it!’ the man said later, 
when out of patience with the boy’s folly, 
“They didn’t turn you right side up quite 
quick enough.” I met one man who pretended 
to a knowledge of phrenology. When he 
learned I was a student he said: “‘Yes, yes! 
I’d know you were a scholar by the location 
of your head.” 

I called on a woman past ninety and very 
talkative. Her sixty-five-year-old third hus- 
band sat near, hearing how his predecessors 
died in Christian peace. “I’ve had three hus- 
bands—praise the Lord—and they’re all alive 
—oh, no! I mean they’re all dead except 
him?” (pointing at him), “he ain’t. They died 
all peaceable.” A little further on she took up 
her testimony, “I hain’t been so good as I 
might, but, Lord, who could, in this wicked 
and adulterous generation!” 

The Rev. Joseph Hamilton, of the Vermont 
Conference, was calling upon an invalid sister, 


178 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


and had some difficulty in giving a spiritual 
turn to the conversation. At last he asked, 
“Do you love Jesus?” | 
The old lady was a little deaf. “Love 
cheese! Well, I_should say I do, but my old 
man is too stingy to get me any.” 

Even the country graveyard has its cheerful 
spots. Merry imps wrote some of the old 
epitaphs. Some which we read of may be 
mythical. One which used to amuse me was: 


*‘Here lie the bones 

Of Robert Trollup 

Who made these stones 
To roll up. 

And when death took 
His soul up, 

His body filled 
This hole up.” 


But I never believed in it. In the Vermont 
State Library I found this: 


“Here under this sod and under these trees, 
Is buried the body of Solomon Pease, 
But under this sod lies only his pod, 
His soul is shelled out and gone up to God.” 


This, too, is one of those things which, not 
having seen, I grasp by faith. But among 
those which I have seen I copy this, from an 
old slate slab in the Center cemetery at Plain- 
field, Vermont: 


BUBBLING OVER 179 


*SABIAL PERKINS 
Drownded Aug. 17, 1826. 
13 yrs. old. 


This blooming youth in health most fair 
To his uncle’s mill-pond did repaire, 
Undressed himself and so plunged in, 
But never did come out again.” 


And from the Plainfield village cemetery I 
copy this: 

“Five times five years I lived a virgin’s life, 

Nine times five years I lived a virtuous wife, 

Wearied of this mortal life, I rest.” 
Which is permissible, surely. But on sub- 
tracting the dates you find three years of her 
life unaccounted for—which is regrettable. 
Near this are the graves of a man and his wife. 
His gravestone says, “At Rest,’ but hers, 
more belligerent, says, ““We Shall Meet Again.” 
In Waterbury Center, Vermont, a inan erected, 
at the request of his second wife, a monument 
to his first, on which appears the name fol- 
lowed by the other information, so that it 
reads, “Died on [such a date] by request of 
his second wife.” And _a friend tells me that 
in Peacham, Vermont, is the grave of one 
Dodge who lived so as to earn this record: 

“Here lies old Dodge who dodged all good 
And never dodged the evil. 


He tried in vain to dodge his death 
And couldn’t dodge the devil.” 


180 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Quaint and crazy such epitaphs may seem— 


however, I am willing to do by all gravestones 


as I would that they should do by me, which 
certainly is not to stand over them and criti- 
cize. \ 

Even better than the graveyard, perhaps the 
richest of all sources of cheerful humor in the 
rural pastorate is a close acquaintance with 
the little tots. A boy in Sunday school said 
that Jesus went into the wilderness and feasted 
forty days, and another reciting the twenty- 
third psalm said, “Thy rocks and thy staff, 
they comfort me.” A baby saint in my parish 
received the donation of a cotton dog. That 
night, using strict economy in prayer, he be- 
sought the Lord as follows, namely: 

‘‘Now I lay me down to sleep. Amen.” His 
mother prompted him, “Oh, go on!” 

“T pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep. Amen.” 
Again urged he said: 

“If I should die before I wake, Amen. I 
want to get done and see my dog.” 

The tiny grandson of a distinguished Ver- 
monter has done his bit toward making a vivid 
interpretation of the Scriptures. With great 
animation he rendered this version: “Now 
Samuel, he lived in the temple, and his mother 
made him a coat of a lot of colors, and it was 
all dark night, and Samuel went to bed in his 


BUBBLING OVER 181 


crib, and all at once he heard the Bogie man 
yell, “Samuel, Samuel!’ ” 

I once asked a little girl if she went to school. 
“No,” she said. “I going next time. I don’t 
know anything yet.” Another little girl had to 
have the stethoscope used on her chest and 
she told us that the doctor came and “tele- 
phoned her nightie.” She saw me in my fur 
coat, patted it and said, “Nice kitty coat.” I 
baptized a little baby who sniffed up his nose 
as soon as he felt the water, shook his head, 
and using both his hands like paddles, scraped 
the drops away as fast as he could. 

On the train I saw a little dimpled girl of 
four years putting her arms around her big 
brother’s neck, with her lips close as if to kiss 
him. Then with great glee in the hearing of 
all the car she cried, “Ho, ho, mamma! IT did 
spit in his ear!” 

Whose heart would not bubble over for joy 
of befriending these little lovables? Besides» 
they leave you in no doubt. If “Guggle-goo- 
goo!’’ is the opinion of a fat, laughing baby, he 
will not leave you in suspense; he will tell you 
so. If he thinks otherwise, he will kick and 
bawl blatantly when you try to take him. 
When babies get to maturity of four years 
there is still more tonic in their frankness. I 
was visiting a family of four beautiful chil- 


182 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


dren. Just as I had formed my opinion which 
was loveliest, the lassie I had chosen, with the 
outspokenness which characterizes children and 
one other class of people, favored me with her 
opinion of me: 

“My, but you’re homely!” 

Turning to her younger sister, I remarked, 
very much humbled, “I guess Miriam doesn’t 
like me.” 

“Es, she *ikes ’00, but she don’t ike to ’ook 
at ’oo.” 

“Why doesn’t she like to look at me?” 

“It’s *tause ’00 are so—so what she said ’oo 
was.” 

Delectable delicacy! Then the pitiful little 
miss climbed on my knee and administered the 
comforts of religion: 

“Did Jesus make ’oo?”’ 

Now that put me in a bad box. I didn’t 
want to blame anybody—and I didn’t want to 
disturb a child’s theology. So I allowed that 
peradventure he did, I couldn’t remember. 

“Zen ’o0o not to blame, is ’00, *tause ’0o is so 
—what she said ’0o was?” 

I denied all culpability, and promised to do 
better, but I fear me I have backslidden. 


PART II 
QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 





QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 


Do you consider the long pasiorate necessary 
to success in the rural church ? 


Yes. The deepest, most abiding construc- 
tive work cannot be done without a long pull, 
under one leadership, toward one statesman- 
hike policy which must cover many years of 
development. Flitting tenure is the curse of 
the pastorate, the schoolroom, the Legislature. 
*‘Never able to come to the knowledge of the 
truth” because their teachers must be “ever 
learning.”” When Asbury and his Knights of 
the Far Country galloped the glens and swam 
the rivers on horseback, the short pastorate 
may have suited the primitive conditions; but 
with a settled and intricate society, sending 
its roots deep and tangled, this cannot be so. 
Does a “big business” or a bank change its 
directors because it is beginning to have suc- 
cess under their leadership? The sooner any 
inefficient pastorate closes the better. But, 
granting the highest grade of efficiency, a long 
succession of short pastorates misses the deeper 
insight, the steady growth. By drawing more 
attention to the minister away from the wor- 
ship of the Christian Church it may indeed 

185 


186 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


stimulate the interest of novelty. ‘The cost is 
half a wasted pastorate for each shift. ‘There 
are things necessary to the most thorough- 
going success which cannot possibly be learned 
by the most intimate pastor during his first 
two years in a parish. Rural confidence can- 
not be won on the wing. 

I am convinced by my own experience. I 
found my church building ruinous, my people 
so discouraged that they almost refused to let 
me try to raise two hundred dollars for re- 
pairs on conditional pledges. They would not 
even buy a bell for the steeple though money 
had been donated for that purpose. The 
salary (very small and nearly one third paid 
by endowment) was never paid on time and a 
large annual deficit was covered only by tax- 
ing the stewards. ‘The church membership 
was but one hundred and twenty-seven. Since 
that time the finances have been put on a 
business basis, the salary increased one hun- 
dred and fifty per cent, bills now paid monthly 
by check on the bank. Benevolences have in- 
creased more than one thousand per cent. 
Modern comforts have been put into the re- 
constructed parsonage, and the church edifice 
has been flanked by a stone-walled and tree- 
filled park. The church building has been 
reconstructed without and within at a cost of 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 187 


much over six thousand dollars. (At the down- 
fall of Germany the bell was ringing all day | 
from our own steeple.) .Though nearly seventy 
per cent of the membership which I found has 
been lost by death and removal, our net gain 
has been over twenty per cent, baptisms some- 
times reaching thirty-five in a year, without 
special services. Meanwhile in a remote com- 
munity called Adamant we have organized a 
church where one had never been, and en- 
couraged it to construct for itself, without 
debt, a beautiful little chapel, where last year 
there were eighteen baptisms and fourteen 
accessions to membership. These successes are 
only the beginning of our dreams, and there is 
nothing significant in them save this one fact: 
I am the first pastor who ever remained more 
than three years. During my first three years 
I labored harder in my parish than my duties 
to the State of Vermont have since then per- 
mitted me to do, but every visible result was 
loss and retrogression until the traditional 
limit was overstayed. Then began success and 
courageous growth. 

Shifting pastorates rot the morale of the 
ministry. The root-evil of the rural pastorate 
is restlessness, and a desire to be gone to 
advancement. Every minister who patiently 
teaches that advancement may be had with- 


188 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


out removal is a prophet. Power and honor 
are in the man, not the place, and it always 
seemed to me an undignified thing for a suc- 
cessful man in any profession to knock about 
from pillar to post. 


Is there anything to offset the depletion of the 
rural church by the going of tts young and others 
to the city ? 


For four years the correspondence of the 
commissioner of agriculture for the State of 
Vermont was done in my home, and it showed 
that great numbers of people were inquiring 
for abandoned farms which they might buy. 
If the State could make available to home- 
seekers the exact information about salable 
farms, it might increase its rural tax revenues 
and reopen many rural schools. A small tide 
is turning back to the country in a way that 
may some time compensate for our losses. It 
is to be remembered that telephones, mag- 
azines, libraries, modern improvements, and, 
most of all perhaps, automobiles have made 
people contented to live in the country, and 
have made the great outer world easily accessi- 
ble from what city folks call their “isolation.” 

The greater flow of folks is cityward, how- 
ever, and the sooner we face the fact that so 
it is and so it will be, the better service we 





QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 189 


shall give. Thus we help train that eighty 
per cent of the nation’s leadership which comes. 
from the country, along with ‘so many who will 
never lead. With the folks who remain we 
can do the intensive and not the numerical 
task. Many a time a statistical success is 
the worst knock-out a country church can 
receive. 

As for abandoned farms in the mountains, 
most of them are natural forest lands which 
have been abused by cultivation until they 
have taken their vengeance. They ought to be 
set out to trees. They should never have been 
inhabited by anything else. 


I have a little Baptist Church in a place where 
there are three other churches. My church is 
one of the strongest ones, but none of the others 
will unite with us and there are only six hun- 
dred people to be ministered to by all. What 
would you do in my place ? 


Get out of it. 

But if for some reason I felt it my duty 
to stay (for sometimes our own feelings are 
as compelling as the generalizations of those 
theorists who settle things from afar), I would 
make the financial sacrifice necessary to stay- 
ing and, forgetting my rivals, I would devote 
myself to intensive teaching with the zeal and 


190 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


contentment of the teacher in college who 
does not worry because he knows his class 
will always be small. I once saw Professor 
Charles D. Adams, of Dartmouth, teaching 
the CEdipus in a.class of six, with great inspira- 
tion, wholly oblivious to all the buggy biol- 
ogists who thronged another class in the same 
college. 


Have you any pet way of solving the question 
of the several churches in the place where one 2s 
needed? What 1s your expervence ? 


The strongest will prevail, and this is as 
it should be. If among several weak churches 
one can be dominant with vitality, the ideal 
thing is that it should absorb the support 
once given to the others, while those other 
organizations die from the earth. Any fed- 
eration which preserves them serves only to 
emphasize, advertise, and increase the tem- 
peramental differences of the members, and to 
drive them into clannishness. In the ordiary 
overchurched community I never had any 
respect for federation at all, until a tour of 
some sections like Center County, Pennsyl- 
vania, made me think that in extreme cases 
it might possibly be temporarily advisable. 
Still it is only a makeshift. It is better to go 
o the root at once and frankly. Let one of 


—— =~ 


_ - 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 191 


the strongest preachers in that denomination 
which is strongest in any given community 
take the field prepared to stay. The problem 
will gradually solve itself without a word of 
proselyting. 

The fact that the church which survives 
will still be denominational is an objection too 
foolish to answer. Better a recognized denom- 
ination manned by a preacher too large- 
minded to emphasize denominational differences 
than several denominations bound in one bun- 
dle where the differences are emphasized at 
every turn. If you give up all denominations 
and start new, you have simply started a 
new denomination out of incoherent elements. 

In my own community I never encouraged 
talk of federation. There used to be four 
churches. Long ago the Baptist died, only 
one member being left (I don’t know whether 
he is organized or not). Next the Universalist 
gave up, and presented their building for a 
town hall. This was before my arrival. The 
Congregational church and mine worked side 
by side for four years when it too could 
no longer continue. All these different ele- 
ments now worship in our church, open their 
homes for prayer meetings, and seem to feel 
like our own original members regarding their 
church home. Many have since joined the 


192 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


church. I received two sons of a Congrega- 
tional minister at one communion ‘by their 
father’s consent and encouragement. We used 
the Congregational building during the recon- 
struction of our own, and it is now being bought 
for community purposes. The only test of this 
harmony came when a former Universalist 
minister, disgruntled for political reasons, an- 
nounced services and advertised one of the 
leading lights of his denomination for the first 
number. They were able to hold only one 
morning service, but the experiment crowded 
our own church to the doors. 


Do you think that one church 2s sufficient 
for a country community ? 


Usually, but by no means always. Many 
times both the social and religious life of a 
community are richer for having two churches. 
This doesn’t necessarily mean lack of unity, 
any more than it would to have several classes 
in school. Whenever I have been pastor along- 
side another pastor, I have asked him to make 
one complete tour of the community with me, 
we together calling on all his people and all 
mine, and this has resulted in delightful rela- 
tions and reciprocities. Organic union, except 
by natural evolution, sometimes gives less real 
unity than before. There may be economic 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 193 


waste, of course. Those who pay the bills or 
serve at the sacrifice should worry about that. | 

Before our own church became the com- 
munity church I was interested to note from 
whom came the frequent suggestions of fed- 
eration. Never from members of either church. 
Never from interested attendants. Always 
from those who might feel some duty toward 
the church but rarely exercised it, and would 
prefer one well-filled church as the better excuse 
for their own absence, one well-paid institu- 
tion as the means of lightening their own sub- 
scription. 

It is customary to urge union in many cases 
where one church positively will not seat one 
fifth of the community to be served. The 
harvest is great, and here we are thinking not 
of gathering it, but of the success of the reaping 
church as an institution. This is the defect of 
our propaganda. If we were actually gather- 
ing that hill-flung harvest, we should now and 
then be glad of an extra barn. This doesn’t 
mean that I want to see a community over- 
churched, simply that I don’t lie awake nights 
to worry about it any more. Time and trend 
will take care of that. By that time we shall 
have talked so much that we shall give the 
credit of the reform to our agitation. But the 
latter was only a symptom. 


194 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS’ 


What do you do with your boys ? 

Our aim is to grip strongly hold of the 
imagination and hero-worship that fill the 
heart of a boy and to turn him on these rud- 
ders to the high. seas of God. “What do you 
do with boys?” Probably the question refers 
to boys as clansmen—how to organize the gang 
spirit.. First we tried the Knights of King 
Arthur, then with better success we organized 
a “Forum Puerorum,” in which we had read- 
ings, debates, mock trials, and Legislatures. 
Its activity was too purely mental. We next 
organized troops of Boy Scouts, and satisfied 
the passion which impersonates the ideals of 
all out of doors. 

Our last camp was on a point of poplars 
jutting into a glassy lake among the peaked 
forest hills. We cut loads of hemlock boughs 
for beds, spread our blankets over them and 
slept in great white tents among the ever- 
green fragrances. 

We had a mess-tent which at first was true 
to its name. Discipline, difficult but needful, 
soon came. Obedience was instant and unques- 
tioning. We learned the value of that as 
soon as we tried to get twenty boys together 
at once. “Come, now!” was answered by 
“Well, just as soon as I get this dish washed, 
Pl——” 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 195 


“Drop that where you are and come now!” 
was the instant rejoinder, unnecessary there- | 
aiter. The boys learned to assemble for 
prayers or meals the instant the bugle blew. 
Two were appointed to serve in turn each day 
as cooks, two as waiters and two as dish 
washers. We sat along the rocks and mossy 
mounds while our rations were dealt us. 

By fishing and picking blueberries the Scouts 
helped support the camp. Our games took us 
ranging the forests. One game was to hurl 
rocks at mimic men of wood until we had 
knocked down all those set up by the opposing 
patrol. The treasure-hunt game was especially 
popular. Two opposing patrols went to their 
tents out of sight while someone took the 
boat, crossed the lake and hid a coil of rope 
under an old stump, making a map of the 
shore and the location of the treasure. The 
map was hidden. Then one patrol was called 
forth at a time (while the other was busy 
indoors) and the patrol was victor which 
could find the map and by it take the boat, 
locate and bring back the treasure in the 
shortest time. 

We had our swimming time (twenty minutes) 
and nobody went into the water at any other 
hour. If any were slow preparing, they lost 
that much from the fun. The lake was not 


196 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


good for bathing; the bottom was rocky and 
deep. One boy got such a good start that I 
let him continue swimming his fifty yards for 
second-class test. I followed him close with 
the boat. At eighty yards I took him in. A 
scout already in the beat wanted to swim back. ' 
After twenty yards I heard him talking to 
himself: “Golly! Don’t know’s I can do this!” 
I backed the boat to him instantly. “Come 
in here right now!’—and he did. : 

I never shall forget how at sunset when the 
lake was so glassy at it mirrored the moun- 
tains the boys loved to turn the bugle first 
toward the great rocky cliffs of Niggerhead 
Mountain, then to a peaked forest hill across’ 
the lake. Two blasts on the bugle, and “Sweet 
and far from cliff and scar,”’ six distinct echoes 
rolled, antiphonally pealing, and died among 
the hills. Then at night we sang songs and told 
stories beside our camp fire which was dupli- 
cated down the glassy waters. 

Our camps and long hikes reveal the nature 
of the boy as nothing else. Strange and un-had 
wisdom is needed at every turn. One boy 
was so willing that others imposed their work 
upon him. One big boy was so slow that his day 
as cook made problems. One boy would not wash 
himself. “Go down to the boat and wash your 
face. Why haven’t you done it before?” 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 197 


“Why, I couldn’t see where it was dirty.” 

Then we expounded that the whole was the 
sum of all the parts; if he diligently washed 
the general area, he would doubtless be re- 
warded by covering the particular smut. 

One boy was touchy and peevish, and 
of course was picked on. They called him 
“Baboon,” greatly to his disgust. I had taught 
the scouts a yell—nine “rahs” with “Boy 
Scouts!” at the end. One morning I had to 
cross the lake before the camp stirred. While 
over, I heard first one voice then another. 
The camp was waking. By and by I heard 
a loud chorus, “‘Rah, rah, rah! Rah, rah, rah!’ 
and fully expecting the Scout yell I listened 
for the rest, and heard “Rah, rah, rah! 
Baboon!’ 3 

But the problems and difficulties of getting 
out with the boys are few compared with the 
values. The ructions are few compared with 
the good fellowship, harmony, and helpfulness. 
Incidentally, too, there is great value in the 
love which the parents give to any pastor who 
can lead their boys, teach and inspire them. 
The Boy Scout organization is not the only 
means of working with boys, but happens to 
be the best we have tried. Camps and hikes 
are very useful, but, of course, the daily work, 
the constant new attainment and the func- 


198 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


tioning of Christian courtesy are the main 
benefits. 

ith the variations due to sex the Camp 
Fire Girls match the Boy Scouts. My sister, 
a Camp Fire Guardian, has many stories to 
tell of girls who have come through normal 
fun and self-expression to devout lives and 
church membership; from ideals of] being 
chorus girls at theaters to that of bemg Red 
Cross nurses and missionaries. 

When the question of what to do with the 
boys refers not to the gang but to the indi- 
vidual, it is much more fascinating. Be one 
of the boy’s elect or you are out of the world 
so far as he is concerned. He lives in a dream 
world and has interests which usually are few 
and intense. Know and join him in the things 
he loves or be fossil. If you must guide him 
from those things, have a more fascinating 
substitute. I know a woman whom to this 
day I should hate to see, because she was 
bored when as a child I wanted her to read 
all the wonderful poems I was discovering. I 
know a man who likewise miserably perished 
because he would not look when I wanted to 
point out mountains on the moon. 

The potter of boyhood works with the wheel 
of hobbies. Mine were astronomy, color, pic- 
tures, poetry, knighthood, and 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR, 199 


“old unhappy far off things 

And battles long ago.” | 
For one of my schoolmates the heavenly robes 
were blue uniforms with brass buttons. The 
locomotive was the dream of another. An- 
other boy hankered for the beasts of the field. 
Erstwhile at gloaming he sneaked around be- 
hind the barn and assassinated a cat. Next, 
in the moon haunted night, he hunted the 
fragrant skunk. His cudgel came down, and 
the creature was extinct. This put the boy 
in bad odor with his relatives, but in un- 
shaken determination to be a mighty hunter 
before the Lord he rounded out the season 
with thirty-five woodchucks, four racoons, and 
one fox, the latter caught alive and tethered 
in the yard. Like Michael contending with the 
devil, he disputed with his brother, not about 
the body of Moses, but about the possession 
of a captive woodchuck in a barrel, Suddenly 
the tears and bawling of the younger boy 
turned to loud laughter. With a yell he tipped 
the barrel over and the woodchuck fled, waving 
his latter portions at the foe as he galloped 
away over the grass. 

The comprehending minister ean work his 
will with any boy to whom he will get close 
enough. The boy has an imaginative and 
imitative hero-worship which will idealize the 


2900 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


minister and whatever themes the latter can 
surround with haloes. Kenneth Graham in 
The Golden Age tells of a paddling boy seated 
in a hog’s trough, which the insulted boy, 
when laughed at, declares is no hog’s trough 
at all but the good ship Argo, out for the 
Golden fleece. I owe my ministry to my 
father’s reading of Bible stories long ago. 
Those old heroes fired my imagination. It 
became my great ambition to wear a full beard, 
and I watched the looking glass for sprouts, 
because in the pictures did not Abraham have 
a cascade of whiskers? I hung by the hands 
from an apple tree, playing Judas Iscariot. 

“‘What are all these pieces of tin?” 

And I would answer: “Oh, those are thirty 
pieces of silver. Don’t touch ’em!” I was 
Moses, and I pasted my paper angels on my 
shoe-box ark of the covenant. Once I crushed 
the “Thrice A Week World” into a heap 
and set fire to it on the top of, the kitchen 
stove. I answered the paternal interference 
with, “Verily, verily, I say unto you IT am 
offcring up sacrifice to the most high God!” 
Father explained quite clearly that sacrifice 
was no longer required but that the house was. 

My education was saved by other hero- 
worship. I had backslidden. Bob Fitzsimmons 
was my hero and I followed my schoolmates 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 201 


about for pugilistic triumphs. I read worthless 
novels. Father then read me “Ivanhoe.” I 
remember running hard’ in the road when my 
ankle turned and I fell in a cloud of dust. 
I was glad. Was not I Bois-Guilbert thrown 
by the thrust of Ivanhoe? English history 
and the Waverley Novels became my passion. 
Those chapter-head quotations sent me to 
Shakespeare. I discovered Burns and Scott’s 
poems. [I talked literature with everyone who 
would listen to me. I was sent to old ballads 
by such lines as 


“My banes are buried in yon kirkyard 
Sae far ayont the sea, 
And it is but my blithesome ghais 
That’s speaking now to thee.” 


So the vistas opened and my loves were fore- 
ordained. The imaginative, imitative hero- 
worship of a boy is the great central rotunda 
of his soul. From it the doors open in every 
direction and the vistas reach endlessly away. 
Somebody chooses and opens them. Why not 
you? 

If you speak of pulpit ministry to the young, 
this must grip the primal emotions; be plain, 
direct, simple, and imaginative. In this it 
differs from ministry to the old only in that, 
if you are arid, the old will make respectful 


202 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


pretense of listening, while the boys will pay 
no attention to the windy blat. The chances 
are that the grown-up like best your sermons 
to the children. 

By the imaginative quality I mean it must 
get its picture hung on the walls of home. I 
heard a memorable sermon to children on 
Lyndonville Camp Ground. Dr. Charles Roads 
was speaking of the evil spirits which get into 
the heart of a boy. On a big paper heart he 
pinned the picture of a bear and told about 
the boy who was “cross as a bear.” Then he 
pinned up a pig and asked if when boys fed 
the pigs they ever saw them backing aside 
from the trough and saying, “After you, my 
sister!’ 

“No, they puts both feet in the trough!” 
exclaimed one little fellow. 

“Surely, they. do,” the preacher said and 
told the evils of piggishness. “Now how can 
one get over being a pig?” The answer “By 
growing up to be a hog!” was admitted to be 
as apt as it was unexpected, and a more excel- 
lent way was shown. Other pictures were 
pinned up to show other evil spirits, among 
them, for the benefit of the girls, a peacock 
to picture vanity. Then the preacher showed 
how we could get rid of our devils. He pinned 
in the center of the heart a copy of Hofmann’s 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR, 203 


picture of the child Christ and the other pic- 
tures fell off the paper fast as they could fall, ; 
illustrating the text “Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God.” | 

There are two dangers in preaching special 
sermons to children. One is that you will 
“talk down” to them, which to the growing, 
manly boy is anathema; the other is that by 
having sermons especially for them you sug- 
gest that they are excused from all other 
preaching. The one great advantage of preach- 
ing to children is that if you really want the 
attention of the adult, you can get it in that 
way. The best method is to have the message 
such that no child can help listening and under- 
standing, and then you have gripped the 
hearts of all. 

As for sex-instruction of the young which 
Is universally neglected in the homes, and which 
has in mind the preservation of personal pur- 
ity, it is a delicate question. I do not know 
how to handle it, but have a few suggestions. 
One is that frankness should not ‘become 
brutal intrusion. Voluntary confidence should 
be encouraged. It is certainly true that any 
Sex attention wakens sex activity, hence to 
overdo is to defeat one’s own purpose. The 
modesty and mystery of nature are not with- 
out wisdom. Surest of all, the one thing not 


204 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


to do is to assist in the circulation of certain 
books which profess to tell everything the 
young should know, but really tell nothing 
which he doesn’t. They waken intense sex 
interest without giving any real information or 
satisfying any question. It takes little such 
fertilizing to make curiosity grow like a weed. 
It is im rich soil. In any case, far beyond 
what the simple wakening of the sex impulse 
would have done, accompanied by a few kind 
and timely words, sexual things have tangled 
his attention and imagination to an extent 
from which he will not recover. 


What ts the social life of the rural community ? 


>> 


One April day a public “sugaring-off” was 
held in the woods at Plainfield, Vermont, and 
the event was photographed and written up by 
reporters for the Boston papers. The ignor- 
ance with which the report was written was 
too much for our risibility. Imagine our merri- 
ment when we read that “hfe in Plainfield 
was very democratic, the leaders in society 
moving freely and familiarly among the lower 
classes.”” Not even a rural imagination would 
be vivid enough to conjecture which were the 
“leaders” or who were “those lower in the 
social scale.” Social life m the country is 
democratic, not because upper and lower 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 205 


classes mingle freely (an idea ridiculous be- 
yond laughter) but because there is no such 
thing as social class distinction in places where 
everybody knows (and talks about) his neigh- 
bor and his neighbor’s business so intimately 
as in rural life. 

If the inquiry relates to the social gatherings 
of the country community, let me describe 
some of these as I have known them in the 
Green Mountains. Each season brings its own. 
In the spring the farmers who make maple 
sugar invite their neighbors to come to the 
sugar house and eat sugar on snow while the 
process of boiling the syrup into sugar is being 
completed. This results in delightful open-air 
parties, wholly informal, with no program but 
conversation, fun, and an occasional snowball 
battle between the youngsters. 

When Memorial Day renews the reminis- 
cences of the sixties, the country band is called 
out to march with the few remaining “boys 
of the Old Brigade” carrying the old flag, and 
followed to the graves of their comrades by 
all the school children in town, the public 
schools always being prominent in the pro- 
grams of the day. The whole town gets 
together, and where there is still an organized 
Army Post and Relief Corps there is often a 
public dinner. This day results in a social 


206 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


concourse of great value. But how rapidly of 
late years have the changes come, the old 
soldiers going swiftly to their long home and 
the stalwart American Legion reminding us 
that we live ina new generation! 

I think the rural patriotic audiences, such 
as gather in places like the G. A. R. Memorial 
Hall at North Calais, Vermont, are the best 
in the world before which to make a speech 
and to have a good time doing it. I was to 
make a speech at Woodbury, Vermont, during 
the Great War, when the chairman announced 
that after one more piece by the band we 
should have the pleasure of listening to the 
Hon., ete. Then the band struck up “Listen 
to the Mocking Bird.” 

Midsummer brings its Sunday-school picnics 
and other annual gatherings out in the hill- 
side forests. There one finds ice cream, lemon- 
ade, conversation, croquet, swings, games, 
love-making, politics, religion, all of innocent 
sort, the oldest inhabitant and the littlest tots 
being welcome. 

Then comes the corn-roast. The night is 
heavy with dew, but the moon shines on the 
tall green standing corn. A great camp fire 
is built on the meadow. Its blaze makes the 
grass vivid with a strange and beautiful green, 
and when it has burned down enough to make 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 207 


red embers each person puts a long-pointed 
stick into the end of a green ear of corn and | 
roasts it brown (or more likely black) on the 
coals, afterward gnawing his hot feast off the 
cob like a squirrel. I never shall forget the 
satisiaction with which I, as a boy reading the 
Waverley Novels, stepped aside from the bon- 
fire and won a sword contest from my chal- 
lenging foe, using our corn roasting sticks for 
weapons. 

The husking-bee used to be a favorite social 
custom. Pumpkin pie, apple pie, doughnuts, 
coffee, and cheese were the refreshments set 
forth by the hostess. The neighbors gathered 
in the lantern-lighted barn and husked out the 
ears which had been previously picked from the 
stooks. If a young man found a red ear among 
the yellow ones, tradition entitled him to kiss 
the girl of his choice. My father saved the 
red ears for seed till nearly all his corn was 
of that color, but he was wise enough not to 
have a husking-bee. 

The Kissing-game is a crop which grows 
_ without much cultivation. I am not invited 
any more, but in “the days of auld lang syne” 
I remember seeing the forfeits paid in Copen- 
hagen, Drop the Handkerchief, Post Office, 
Needle’s Eye, or anything else which allowed 
young people to yield to their natural impulses 


208 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


under an excuse which saved their bashfulness. 
After joining the church on probation I once 
danced the “Virginia Reel”’ in blissful ignorance 
of the rules of the saints. An old lady gave 
me a Scotch blessing. A little later, her own 
daughter, president of the Epworth League, 
was the most prominent figure in a kissing 
party. To another elderly saint, “aiblins nae 
temptation,” I “wispered *i her lug” that I 
couldn’t see wherein it was worse to hop to 
the music of “Gathering Peascods” or “Old 
Zip Coon” than to engage in promiscuous kiss- 
ing games. With horrified wisdom she told me 
that the dance had “evil tendencies’ but the 
kissing game was only “silly.” Both are still 
common enough. But here ends this oscilla- 
tion into osculation. 

The country fair must never be forgotten 
among rural social events. James Hogg refused 
Sir Walter Scott’s invitation to accompany him 
to the coronation of King George IV on the 
eround that this would necessitate his absence 
from the Selkirk fair; but I myself knew of a 
person who chose to attend the Woodstock 
fair in preference to a tour of Yellowstone 
Park; and one couple timed their marriage so 
as to make their wedding trip to Tunbridge 
fair. These fairs usually last three days, end- 
ing with horse races. There are exhibits of 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 209 


everything which can be raised on a farm, 
produced or manufactured either by men or 
women, all under competition for prizes. The 
attendance is largely influenced by social con- 
siderations, for it is a place to meet friends 
from all over the county. Most rural com- 
munities have Granges, and the Grange fair 
is, on a smaller scale, as good as the county 
fair, and is better as a socializing agent, for 
it is confined to the community. The exhibits 
are educative and the rivalry helpful. I love 
the color-variety of a great table loaded with 
all kinds of fruits and vegetables. 

Which table reminds us of the Harvest 
Dinner. The old-fashioned “boiled dinner” is 
served annually by the ladies of the church. 
Cabbage, turnip, beets, potatoes, carrots, 
squash, corned-beef, and salt pork are all put 
in one great kettle and boiled for dinner, the 
remaining portions being chopped into “red 
flannel hash” for supper, the beets giving the 
color, and the color giving the name. A little 
later in the season tradition requires a church 
“chicken-pie’’ dinner. 

One night every year I hear a strange knock, 
and if I remember that it is Halloween, I am 
not surprised when I open the manse door to 
see nobody but a great grinning jack o lantern, 
carved out of a green or yellow pumpkin and 


910 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


lit with a candle. Last Halloween the visitors 
were white-sheeted ghosts which mumbled inar- 
ticulately. My little niece im terror cried: “T 
want ’em outdoors! I want ’em outdoors!” 
I have been to Halloween parties where all 
kinds of witches and horrors were masquerade 
processional. Once by moonlight in the barren 
loft of an old school building we were seated 
sn a circle and told the story of Timothy, who 
was horribly mur-r-rder-r-red. ‘Then we were 
told to pass from hand to hand around the 
circle the evidences of Timothy’s mortality. 
A girl, shrinking with a scream from the touch 
of a cold, raw oyster, was told in guttural tones, 
“Take Timothy's eyel”’ Next it was, “Take 
Timothy’s hand!”—a rubber glove tied full of 
cold water. Then as we filed past Timothy’s 
coffin in another attic, the phantom of the 
departed belabored us each with a horsewhip. 
On Halloween the youngsters sometimes cel- 
ebrate to the confusion of their elders. One 
farmer hunted all over his premises for his 
wagon, but it was nowhere to be found until 
somebody suggested that he look up to his 
house roof. There it was, with wheels astride 
the ridge-pole. 

Thanksgiving as a social event is confined 
to the family circle, but Christmas is the crown 
of the year. In the family the little folks hang 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 211 


up their stockings, but the public jubilation is 
around the great spruce tree, on Christmas Eve 
set up in the church and laden with presents 
to be distributed in the congregation on call 
of the owner’s name, after the program of 
song and speaking, mostly by little folks. 
Santa Claus always comes on the stage in 
person, and nobody ever grows old enough 
not to delight in the joys and colors of the 
Christmas tree. 

In the long winter evenings there are parties 
around at the homes where social games are 
played, too familiar to be described here. 
There is a whole library of books describing 
such games. There are refreshments of cake 
and coffee, or better yet, of apples—great Mc- 
Intosh Reds, Northern Spies, Golden Russets 
—and richly buttered popped corn, piping hot, 
just off from the kitchen range. It is good to 
live in the country on terms of social, natural 
friendship with all the folks you know. 

I do not mean that rural social life is always 
heavenly. I know of nothing that can be more 
terribly mangled by feuds, in the unfrequent 
event of something like a school or church row. 
But the storm settles back into sunshine, and 
it does not often blow. 

As for organized social life in the country, 
there is not only the Grange, but in most 


912 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


villages you can count more than a dozen 
distinct organizations. Sometimes there are 
hardly enough nights in the week for the de- 
mands of the country village. The business is 
greatly overdone, and the need for federation 
of rural churches is so small as to sink into 
insignificance when compared with the greater 
need for federating the social organizations of 
country life. 

Telephone, automobile, moving picture, radio, 
and all the new influences are rapidly modify- 
ing the old-time social life, even of remote 
glens and mountains. 


What would you say to a young man who 
objects to the rural pastorate because he cannot 
grow in the country ? 


I should not deny his inability to grow! 
The man who cannot grow in the country can- 
not grow anywhere. Vitality lies in the man, 
not in his environment. Be very sure of that. 
But go a step further and you will find that 
a rural environment is supremely favorable to 
intellectual growth. There are no city advan- 
tages whatever which can equal the long un- 
broken hours of study in which one is lord of 
his own moments, and intellectual monarch of 
all he surveys. His very privations are to his 
advantage. He misses the great city library, 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 213 


the result is that he, being compelled to gather 
a good library of his own, loves those books 
better and lives with them more than he would 
with alien tomes. The topics of the hour are 
not thrust quite so insistently upon his atten- 
tion; the result is a more perfect mental per- 
spective. The great things of the ages loom in 
their true proportion; he is dominated by the 
inspiration of classic, noble things when he 
would otherwise be overridden by trivialities of 
the street and the news page. He does not so 
often hear the lectures of notable men; they 
are therefore much more impressive and memo- 
rable when he does hear them. That. so 
many country preachers do not grow is not 
the fault of the country. Quiet Bethany and 
desert places apart were the haunts of Jesus ; 
Paul went into Arabian solitude for three years, 
and before he was fit to lead Israel, Moses had 
to tend sheep for forty years in the lone moun- 
tains of Midian, 


“Remembering there on mountains lone 
He might have ruled from Egypt’s throne.” 


The glow of imperial thinking, as Adams calls 
it, the supreme contemplation, as Victor Hugo 
names it, are there. And with modern trans- 
portation and communication, the serene, well- 
poised countryman may magnetize to himself 


214 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


the best advantages of the city without the 
seatteration distractions which would bedevil 
his mental effort if he lived in it. The common- 
place mind may find irksome the loss of urban 
stimulus, but the deep, masterly thinking of 
genius is done in tranquil loneliness, either 
of environment or circumstance. The busy 
hours of Van Dyke were not entirely in vain, 
but the one vision of his life which makes it 
worth while to other generations that he has 
lived was revealed when Providence stopped 
all hustle and sent him into the Hall of Dreams 
to receive the story of The Other Wise Man. 
The busy freedom of Bunyan may have been 
useful, but the world cares only for the solitude 
out of which came the immortal Pilgrim. 
Milton’s life was not altogether wasted, per- 
haps, in the busy world of pamphleteering 
politics, but Paradise Lost was revealed in 
the dark and lonely quiet. Supreme, lonely 
concentration is the price of intellectual great- 
ness, and no work in the world so nearly fur- 
nishes the right environment as the rural 
pastorate. Ten thousand live in that environ- 
ment and never know the opportunity, but the 
few minds great enough to be worthy of it 
will send forth an influence like the Amazon 
River, whose current can be distinctly seen 
five hundred miles out to ocean. 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 215 


Be very sure of this: If after looking into 
the facts any man really believes he cannot ; 
grow in the country, let him stay in the city. 
The country neither needs nor wants him. 


Is there not a lack of intellectual stimulus in 
the country ? 


The man who depends on locality for his 
intellectual stimulus will not very much rob 
the world if his intellect is not stimulated. 

Ii I may judge from a remark made to me 
after a lecture in New York city, intellectual 
stimulus is not always a characteristic of urban 
life: “Why, your speech was altogether unusual, 
you interested us!” 

It is possible, however, for an intellectual 
person to be so constituted as not to be able 
to respond to the stimuli of the country. It 
is a matter of native taste and adaptation, and 
the stimuli are radically different. I have 
always believed that the intellectual stimuli of 
the country were far greater in power and 
variety than those of the city, but if. a man 
is not fitted by nature to appreciate them; if 
he does not enjoy the forms, colors, and end- 
less varieties of nature; if he cannot live close 
to human nature as he must in the country, 
he would better deposit his intellect in the 
city. 


216 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Do you believe in the institutional church for 
the country parish ? 

Yes, but not the city organization loaded 
into a country community without adaptation 
to rural needs.- Rural institutions differ from 
urban by inconspicuous, great essentials and 
only years of intimacy (mind, the word is not 
observation) can reveal what they should be. 
Then, if we do establish an institutional church 
in the country, we are not to imagine we are 
doing a new thing. An old parish house at 
Kittery, Maine, bears this inscription: 


Benjamin Stevens, D.D. 
Community House 
Built in 1730 

Made possivle by the 
| Bequest of 
John S. Sewall, D.D. 


Dr. Stevens Pastor 
from 
1751 to 1791 


What do you think of the methods of the pres- 
ent rural church movement ? 

The division is impartial between the rattle 
of the wheels and the going of the cart. After 
loading my library with the lumber out of 
which they are built, I conclude that all our 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 217 


works are begun in survey, continued in pro- 
gram, and ended in demonstration. 

A survey we must have in every parish, 
but by all means a secret one. Let no man 
know he is being “surveyed” if you want his 
self-respecting friendship on such terms of 
equality as can avert his manly contempt. 
When your “community survey’ is complete 
and ready to lay before the church, give out 
(to carefully selected helpers) only such facts 
as will induce laborers to the harvest, or are 
needed for a definite, immediate purpose. 
Then don’t overload your survey with facts 
which are none of your business. This is a 
fault in every suggested survey I have seen. 
They all remind me of the Plainfield physician 
who thought to simplify his business by a new 
method of bookkeeping. When I asked him 
why he didn’t come to play croquet any more 
he said, “I have to use all my spare time now 
on my new method of bookkeeping.” There is 
on my table at this moment A Method of 
Survey which would ask not only the essential 
facts about the family, but the number of acres 
in the farm, the value per acre, the sources of 
income, the number of books, the number of 
rooms in the house, the age of each person, 
and thirty-seven other questions, many of them 
equally impertinent. Being rural from baby- 


218 STEEPLES AMONG. THE HILLS 


hood, I have had more merriment over this 
book than over Mark Twain, and it is as good 
a survey as [ have yet seen. I can picture the 
folks being “surveyed”’; one twinkling with the 
ludicrous, another patient and puzzled; another 
nettled by the impudence of it, and another— 
hale, emphatic old farmer, God bless him!— 
rising angrily to advise going to hell. I knew 
one “surveyor” who remarked, “I’m glad to 
see you do have a Bible.” The response was, 
“Yes, and I know what is in it as well as you 
do.” May your death be easy in any rural 
parish where you appear to poke around with 
your nose for personal facts to use as jack- 
screws for “uplifting.” Wherefore, my breth- 
ren, if ye survey, be ye secret and simple 
therein; and if ye be so, ye will not think that 
this hobby of the day is a new thing. It hath 
been ever of old, and every true pastor has 
known his people (perhaps too well to need 
written notes about them) though he did not 
name his intimacy by the modern term. 
Consider now the program. Its real con- 
structiveness will depend on the expected 
length of the pastorate, but the first item on 
any new pastor’s program is to become so 
intimate with his people that he will know 
their needs without resort to the artificial 
process of looking up the “survey,” which, for 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 219 


historical purposes, he may be wise enough 
to have. Until this intimacy is reached it is 
foolhardy to plan a comprehensive program, no 
matter what notes of fact one may have gath- 
ered. Little by little the dreams take form. 
The pastor has come to a place where the 
congregations are small, the youth and children 
neglected, the support miserably inadequate 
and tardily paid, the church building, always 
il-adapted, now a ruin. Any other minister 
would think of this as impossible except for a 
temporary pastorate. But this man _ looks 
down along a Rhineland of magnificent castles 
in the air. He harvests the youth and little 
_ tots, he rallies the people to renew and beautify 
the house of God. Some will ask him if we 
cannot worship God as well in a poor and 
plain old house as in a new and beautiful one. 
He will steadfastly answer ““No, and we of the 
cozy homes would be ashamed to do so if we 
could.”” I once had the bare old church of 
the Pilgrim Fathers thrown in my face. Forth- 
with I said: “The simple fact about the Pil- 
grim Fathers is that they gave to God the 
best they had. They did not build that bare 
house in the midst of carpeted homes filled 
with mahogany chairs and pianos.” (For you 
will find such furniture close to many a rural 
church.) The pastor knows that the support 


220 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


is inadequate because not half the community 
is enlisted. He soon sees the church on a good 
business basis, all bills paid, at least monthly, 
by a check on the bank. Thus far the pro- 
gram is fairly easy, but the pastor does not 
yet dare tell his people that down beyond 
these realizations he sees others yet more 
noble. Beside a beautiful park which he and 
his people have made in the midst of the 
village stands a new church, superseding the 
old (never mind those repairs which were made 
on the latter ten years ago), adapted to all 
modern purposes, possibly built of stone and 
surely exceedingly beautiful; for in a church 
building utility may sometimes be spared, but 
beauty never. I have ached more at the 
gawky architecture of churches in a hundred 
villages than at the profanity on the street. 
The latter is ephemeral; the former swears 
across the village green and into the blue sky 
every day. Beside this ivied church the pastor 
sees a parish house in which there is a gym- 
nasium for boys (and girls at different hours), 
a cozy town library, an assembly and amuse- 
ment hall with piano, ferns, radio, and vic- 
trola. In the basement, of easiest access by 
side door from the street, is the room where 
old men, or workmen at evening, sit by the 
fireplace and smoke, if they are unfortunate 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 221 


enough to have the habit. But suppose all 
these improvements accomplished, they are only 
the machinery for working and no part of the 
real program of spiritual development. Little 
by little the church has become the dominant 
influence of all the countryside, the one home 
of all the people. Only a great manina long pas- 
orate can accomplish it, but for him a program of 
such magnitude is inevitable, dreamed and done. 

Each man must form his own program out 
of his own heart and observation, but no man 
who hopes to succeed in a rural church must 
leave out the one thing which, though most 
important of all, is usually omitted by peddlers 
of rural advice. I mean preaching, strong, 
heart-moving preaching, eloquent in the true 
sense of the word, filled with intellect and 
thrilled by intimacy with God, so deep in sym- 
pathy with its hearers as human beings that 
it forgets whether they are farmers or sena- 
tors. The preaching of Jowett or Morgan is 
not too good for the rural church. After read- 
ing the twaddle of the present one -would 
almost think that a rural preacher should 
speak upon the relative values of manures and 
the buying of cattle, instead of swinging open 
the gates of the kingdom of God. If our 
advisers themselves knew more of rural life, 
they would know that the preacher who tries 


2229 STEEPLES AMONG THE -HILLS 


their kindergarten methods among the coun- 
try folks will soon appear like the fool he is 
advised to be. I wish I could quote directly 
the brilliant article of which Albert E. Roberts 
told me at Silver Bay. A country pastor went 
to a rural betterment meeting. One speaker 
was qualified to advise because he had been 
born in the country and got out of it as soon 
as possible; another had been invited because 
of the writings which he had sent from his 
city desk after one brief rural pastorate; and 
the third speaker founded his observations on 
an automobile tour he had once made through 
a farming district. After hearing the speeches 
the country pastor suddenly remembered that 
twice he had himself been to the city, so he 
wrote an article telling the city preacher how 
to run his church. There might be merchants 
in his congregation, so he should take a course 
in marketing and embody its results in helpful 
advices; there would be bankers in the pew, 
so he must tell them about investments and 
the taxation of intangibles; and there would 
be brokers, so no up-do-date city preacher 
should fail to broke! There would be under- 
takers, and he must be able to tell how to 
render a suitable corpse to a mourning congre- 
gation. Ludicrous as it was, it was not a bit 
more so than country preachers are finding iis 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 223 


reverse to be. You cannot fashion your pro- 
gram on external advice, for the advisers do 
not know the facts; or,, more correctly, they 
do learn the facts, knowing nothing of the 
temperamental forces by which to value them. 

One writer daubs a good book on country 
life with this quotation (“Independent” of 
August 26, 1909) referring to a country min- 
ister. “On a Sunday if it comes to a pinch 
between having his parishioners’ hay get wet 
and his church get empty, why should he not 
put his manuscript in his pocket, take a hay 
fork in his hand and help his poorest parish- 
loner secure his crop? This, at least, should 
be his comprehension of righteousness and 
duty.” We will overlook the fact that the 
pastor may be trying, at least by example, 
to teach his people to keep the Ten Command- 
ments. We will overlook the fact that he 
probably doesn’t have a manuscript to put in 
his pocket, for most of the rural preachers who 
grip their congregations talk face to face and 
heart to heart. But no man _ indigenously 
acquainted with the country can overlook the 
fact that if a rural preacher just once should 
pitch hay in the fields on Sunday, his pastorate 
would be ended, and none would share the 
prejudice against him more deeply than the 
man for whom he pitched. When our advisers 


294 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILES 


write such asinine things how can they aid our 
“comprehension of righteousness and duty’? 

The thought that a successful rural parish 
must be a demonstration point of visible accom- 
plishments, usually relating to this temporal 
world, is another danger in the rural church 
movement. Such demonstration points might 
be of great use, but should be regarded as 
clinics rather than as normally functioning 
rural parishes. Just so soon as a parish con- 
sciously becomes a center of observation, its 
normal self-expression and development fail 
under the tremendous temptation to do the 
obvious and visibly successful things, which 
more often than not are least in importance. 
Without accomplishing any of those things 
which catch the eyes of the critic of rural life 
a pastor may sometimes be laying the founda- 
tions of life deep as those of Fletcher of Made- 
ley; on the other hand, he may accomplish 
all these visible successes, yet wholly fail in 
the vital work of the pastorate. There is 
no such thing as the rural problem. You 
sit down to a problem, study, demonstrate 
and are done with it when you _ write 
“Q. E. D.” But the force needed in the 
country church is like a mountain river which 
may indeed run from mill wheel to mill wheel, but 
which is constant and never done with its work. 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 225 


These criticisms will not blind us to the 
good in the rural church movement. Its mes- 
sages are not advice to be taken in toto, but 
they are stores from which the right man 
will adapt and select. And I do not believe 
the stars exist more firmly than I believe that 
the only thing which need concern us in the 
least about any country church is to get the 
right man for its pastor. Given that, all 
other suggestions are superfluous; failing that, 
all else is in vain. The right man will know 
his own program before you can get your 
mouth open to tell him; the wrong man will 
make a joke of any program, the larger the 
plan, the bigger the joke. 


Do you believe in moving pictures as a sub- 
stitute for the Sunday evening sermon ? 


Each pastor must decide this for himself. 
Some films are highly educational and a few 
rare ones are spiritual, but you must reckon 
on the difficulty of obtaining such films. At 
a Theological Seminary Summer School a man 
who had once been a minister profaned the 
chapel with a picture which he was trying to 
sell as a substitute for preaching on Sunday 
evenings. It was a sex story with all the 
sordid situations minutely set forth. The 
fact that such inanity can be recommended to 


226 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


a summer school of ministers must reveal some 
difficulty in getting good films. This one was 
commended because its moral teaching was 
good. That is like eating rotten apples so that 
you will know what fruit to avoid. In moving 
pictures it is the impression on the eye and 
the imagination during the process which is 
of supreme importance. The “moral outcome” 
apart from this is so little impressive as to be 
almost wholly negligible. 

I once received a letter which said, “Will 
you come and lecture in our opera house and 
we will have moving pictures for the attrac- 
tion?” I did not go. Yet it may be possible 
to attract people to church in that way and 
then win them over to what they didn’t want. 
Without some evangelistic effort on the audi- 
ence I should not care for pictures in the 
church. Nothing is gained by having a crowd 
in church if they are there only for secular 
purposes. There is no reason why a church 
should burden itself with what can be better 
done for the same crowd on some week night 
in the opera house. And I do not share the 
haste of some reformers to secularize our most 
sacred places. 

Apart from their relation to the church, I 
think the movies fail at the two points where 
they are most thought to succeed. 1. They 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 227 


are unreal. Witness the unnatural gasping and 
posing, the jumping-jack activities, the con- 
stant repetition of the same few faces to repre- 
Sent many characters; also the ludicrous, im- 
possible blunders. When I saw a boy sup- 
posed to have been raised in our New England 
winters running on floating ice without know- 
ing enough to remove his heavy fur coat, the 
tragic picture became comic. 2. T hey are unin- 
teresting. I read a book and I can see the 
Jandscape in all its color and the action as it 
is presented by the author. I go to the theater 
and I see a quivering, dull-gray rapid monotony 
which makes the moonlight seem blessed after 
an hour and a half of incarceration. But this 
is a gratuitous personal opinion. 


Hlow much publicity should a rural pastor give 
to hs program ? 


Publicity is peril. A far-seeing statesman- 
like program is necessary, visioning down the 
vistas. But if God has given a man a revela- 
tion of great things to accomplish—and the 
chances are nine out of ten that his people 
are not ready to understand him—let him dwell 
“In the secret place of the Most High,”’ 

If step by step, with only those in ‘his con- 
fidence who are necessary to its performance, 
the pastor leads his church to some new 


228 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


achievement, he keeps it vital with constant 
refreshment. If he begins by telling all his 
dreams, he challenges misunderstanding, then 
opposition, then acceptance, then, since the 
whole thing Is mapped, the drudgery of per- 
formance. It might have been the inspiration 
of adventure. 

Of course, where an aim is immediate, every- 
one who is expected to cooperate should be 
taken into full confidence, but ordinarily I 
think of my program as I do my skeleton. I 
am glad I have one to keep me in shape, but 
I do not use it for demonstration purposes. 
Let the program appear afterward, if at all, 
fat with the flesh of achievement. 

Not because it is inconvenient to make those 
minor changes which are always necessary in 
any living program, but for psychological rea- 
sons a long-time plan should not be too blatant. 
One of the great inventors of the day (the 
most successful psychologist of my acquaint- 
ance) was hearing a less successful inventor 
tell his initial plans. ‘“‘Now I see,” he an- 
swered, “why you fail to finish anything. 
When you tell your idea before its last perfec- 
tion, you give it away; it is not yours and 
will not grow in you any more. Shut it up 
in your own consciousness and it will grow like 
a weed.” 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 229 


Do you take any means to distribute literature 
among your people ? 

Yes, but not too frequently, and always 
with some effort to make it become familiar 
and precious. For example, wishing Fosdick’s 
book, The Meaning of Prayer, to be in the 
hands of my people, I announced that it 
would be the basis of ten prayer meetings, and 
I asked them to buy and discuss it with me 
for ten weeks. This made it a treasure in each 
family. Wishing to teach my people that 
tithing was scriptural and the lowest propor- 
tion of giving which a self-respecting Christian 
could adopt, I bought one hundred copies of 
The Victory of Mary Christopher. Then I told 
my people that a great joy-giving truth which 
I had preached and wanted them to practice 
with me was taught in a heart-touching story, 
and I would make each family a present of 
the book, if they would first faithfully promise 
me to read it. This they did with great effect. 
In every parish the standard paper of the 
church should be urged into every home. 


Isn't ut a sacrifice of the pleasures of home life 
for a woman. to go to a country manse? 

No, indeed. The rush and interruptions of 
work, largely for trivial causes, make home 
life in the city parsonage much more difficult 


4 


930 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


than in the quiet country. I cannot imagine 
a more ideal selection for a real home than a 
rural parsonage. My statement comes not only 
from long experience in a rural manse, but 
from as many years of very intimate acquaint- 
ance with the parsonages of certain very suc- 
cessitul city pastors. It is the latter who give 
up the joys of home, their life is so overrun by 
the parish. 


Would the country minister be more free for 
his work if unmarried ? 


No. I know a woman of good mind who 
objects to an unmarried priesthood that, since 
nearly all troubles in the world are the diffi- 
culties folks have in getting along with each 
other, in one way or another, a priest who has 
no such problems in the home cannot help the 
solution of such problems in the world. This 
might be interpreted with a mischievous twinkle 
in the eye, but if it has any force anywhere, 
it is in the rural life where one is close to ele- 
mental human nature. 

Besides, the single young pastor is a shining 
mark, and we read, “God save the mark!” 


How can the “God-forsaken” borders be evan- 
gelized, uf most of the inhabitants persistently 
fail to respond to all appeals which seek to inter- 
est them wn “the Church at the center’? 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 231 


By gathering up an armful of good old 
Gospel song books and going out to the old 
red school house and holding meetings. Few 
school directors would dare refuse permission, 
and few homes could resist the attraction of 
their real community center, the school house, 
be it old or new. Regular Sunday afternoon 
meetings could be held in several districts at 
once if a pastor would encourage a few leaders 
from his church to help him, laymen taking 
charge in one place when the pastor was visit- 
ing another. These would not need to be 
formal preaching services, and once in three 
or four weeks at most the pastor could lead in 
person at each schoolhouse on this lay-pastoral 
circuit. I know of no meeting equal to an 
old-fashioned schoolhouse meeting en a winter 
evening. The Rev. Anthon T. Gesner, of 
Berkeley Divinity School, has a little Victrola 
and some choice sacred records which he got 
just for the purpose of assisting just such 
meetings as these. If you get into a school- 
house, you probably get the child who attends 
there, and that gets the parent too. Let the 
services be simple but full of song and feeling. 


What can be done with the rural mid-week 
prayer meeting ? 


Early in my ministry I rebuked the Sunday- 


932 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


morning assembly of the saints for not attend- 
ing prayer meeting in copious aggregations. 
“Tf it were the funeral of your father, would 
you not be there? Well, that proves that you 
could attend; and if you can, you ought.” 
After one of these pastoral outbreaks there was 
a tearful midweek meeting, in which the atten- 
dants seemed to feel that the value of their 
presence was not appreciated by a pastor who 
was looking only for a large number. The 
meeting had two effects. Raging with inward 
indignation, I bought an old house on my 
father’s farm overlooking the main range of 
the Green Mountains, and decided to be out 
of the ministry as soon as possible. But as 
soon as I had a place to which to go I was 
not in such a hurry to quit. Cooling off, I 
next enjoyed the reaction which has never 
left me. Never again would I get excited about 
the midweek service. Never again would [ 
consider it the “thermometer of the church” or 
the measure of faith. To me henceforth it 
should be an elective, to use the language of 
the schools, ardently sought and needed by 
some temperaments, but not therefore a stand- 
ard by which to judge others. Never again 
would I mourn or care that only thirty attended 
out of a membership of one hundred and fifty. 
The only thing which should henceforth con- 


ee ——? = Pe Me oe, ~~ 


m 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 233 


cern me was the real presence of God and the 
value of the program among the few who came, . 
or the many, be it as it, would. On that basis 
of intensive service the meetings have been’ 
more successful, better attended. 

Sometimes they are made meetings of care- 
ful study with a textbook... We have used the 
several Fosdick books, like The M eaning of 
Prayer, discussing one chapter a week, some- 
times with personal assignments, sometimes 
also reading the prayers therein as a ritual in 
unison, or one by one. .We spent a whole 
summer studying the parables of Jesus using 
three texts: Studies in the Parables of Jesus, 
by Luccock; The Teachings of Jesus, Hubbard; 
and The Parables of Our Saviour, by Taylor. 

Sometimes we have taken some book of the 
Bible by course, assigning to individuals for 
presentation at the next meeting the portions 
to be covered during the week, so that each 
attendant had some part definitely prepared. 
Sometimes we have announced one Old Tesita- 
ment character after another in series as themes 
for our discussion. 

Sometimes I send announcementsof themes by 
mail, accompanied by invitation. I never do this 
regularly or it would lose its force by becoming 
the expected thing. Here is one of the notices 
which I sent, covering the month of October: 


234 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 
PRAYER MEETING TOPICS FOR OCTOBER 


Sent by your pastor 


OcrosperR 6. Endless Differences. References: Matt. 

25. 31-46. 

Suggestions for testimony: 

Does the fear of hell move the world 
to-day as much as it ought? 

How has Christ made you different 
from what you were? from what you 
would have been now if you never, 
had known him? 

Try to describe Plainfield as it would 
have been to-night if it had never 
heard of Christ. 

What great differences has the gospel 
made in the history of the world? in 
its literature? 

Does the thought of heaven really 
make a difference in the comfort of 
your daily task? 


OcroBeR 13. Those Whom God Has Answered. Exam- 
ples of unmistakable manifestation of 
God will be given both from the Bible 
and from life. 


OcroBER 20. Editing the Plainfield Herald. Write out 
and read at this meeting some religious 
thought, story, experience, or item, in 
prose or rhyme; some advertising of our 
departments of church work; or anything 
else that would be helpful if put m a 
religious paper published for our com- 
munity by our church. This will be 
the whole program of the meeting. 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 235 


Ocroper 27. Studies in Personal Work. Help for those 
to whom soul winning by personal inter- | 
view does pot come natural or easy. 
Bring Bibles to the meeting. The ob- 
jections likely to be made by those 
whom we seek to win will be answered, 
out of the Scriptures. 

Come to Every Meeting if by Any Effort it is Possible. I 

Want You Very Much. Pray for Each Meeting. 


Some years ago I was at a meeting at Weirs 
on Lake Winnepesaukee and heard Dr. M. S. 
KKaufman give the following list of questions 
which I have used with fine effect in meet- 
Ings, stating the questions fully, but taking 
great care not to answer them. I have prefaced 
them by two brief texts. 

**As we forgive our debtors.” 
“God be merciful to me a sinner.” 


1. Is a forgiven sinner treated by God as if he had 
never sinned? 

2. Is the forgiven sinner as good as if he had never 
sinned? 

3. Do sins, once forgiven, rise to condemn a forgiven 
man if he afterward sins? 

4. Will the sins we have done be effaced from our 
memories in eternity? 

5. Must we forgive those who wrong us whether they 
ask it or not? 

6. To which is the greater benefit—forgiver or for- 
given? 

7. Are we required to forget as well as forgive? 


236 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


At the close of one service I announced: “The 
subject of our next meeting will be ‘Am I 
my Brother’s Keeper?’ *”’ Then I proceeded to 
distribute by name among those present the 
following questions to be answered at the next 
meeting: 


1. Should one have any concern over his 
neighbor’s conduct when moral or religious 
issues are not involved? 

2. Should one try to influence his neighbor’s 
conduct in matters where his own is at fault, 
known or unknown? 

3. Should we study to find particulars in 
which we can guide the action of others, or 
concern ourselves only with those which cir- 
cumstances bring to our attention? 

4. If one can stop an evil at the cost of 
friendship and future influence, is the price 
too great? 

5. If you feel called to interfere with evil- 
doing and fail to do it, what is the result upon 
yourself? 

6. How far is it right to break the laws of 
social etiquette in the interests of religious 
conduct? 

7. Should solicitude for the conduct of others 
relate only tomattersof admitted right and wrong 
or also to things which are matters of opinion? 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 237 


8. Tf we cannot be faultless in both the two 
points of minding our own business and of 
exercising our full powers of caring for others, 
which way should we lean? 

9. Can a Christian deal just as frankly with 
the conduct of ungodly persons as with that 
of other Christians? 

10. Is franknessbetter than indirect influence? 

Often I ask laymen to lead the meetings. 
Special music is a great help, and is usually to 
be had for the asking. Evenings spent study- 
ing the stories of the great hymns, or vitalizing 
them by our own experiences, are full of 
Inspiration. For instance, in our Annual Con- 
ference of 1906 Bishop John W. Hamilton was 
presiding at Morrisville, Vermont. The news 
came that San Francisco had fallen by earth- 
quake and was burning, the fire raging near 
the bishop’s home. One morning the bishop 
told us that he had no way of knowing that 
his family had not all perished—his library 
collected through forty years at a cost of 
$10,000 gone, but—‘“Last night, brothers, I 
settled all that on my knees before God.” 
Down on the center aisle sat Thomas C. Iliff, 
white-haired apostle of the Rocky Mountains. 
Shaking his white mane back upon his shoul- 
ders and looking up toward the heavens, he 
sang: 


238 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


“Other refuge have I none; 
Hangs my helpless soul on thee: 
Leave, ah! leave me not alone, 
Still support and comfort me: 
All my trust on thee is stayed, 
All«my help from thee I bring; 
Cover my defenseless head 
With the shadow of thy wing.” 


For ever afterward that song was to have a 
new sanctity in my memory. Let each bring 
to some midweek service the songs which have 
been sanctified by his sorrows or his joys. 

Sometimes when a meeting is thrown open 
“for testimony” it is well to ask someone by 
name to lead off, and to call upon someone else 
as he closes, who will likewise pass on the 
eall to another till all have spoken. Sometimes 
I have had the discussion in the form of a 
question-box, assigning or answering the ques- 
tions as I took them out. 

The midweek service is devotional. It is 


for heart-hungry folks who want to get mear ..~ 


to God. This should never be forgotten. It 
is the spirit which should prevail, whatever 
the theme. Sometimes in a group of young 
people led by one of their own age, I am asked, 
evidently as the easy way out, to “lead in 
prayer.”’ Often I step out and face the group 
asking them what ones are willing to help me. 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 239 


As the hands come up, I ask what things we 
ought to pray for in the meeting, and as sug- 
gestions are made I ask those who have raised 
their hands to pray, one for one thing, another 
for another. Sometimes where they were 
especially inexperienced or uncertain I have 
asked them all to rise, and I have led them 
in prayers which they would all repeat after 
me, sentence by sentence in unison. Some- 
times we have used prayers out of the com- 
munion ritual; sometimes we have had our 
whole “season of prayer,’ just singing softly 
and with bowed heads those hymns which are 
also prayers like, 


“More love to thee, O Christ, 
More love to thee!”’ 


Meetings largely of prayer and song, espe- 
cially meetings devoted to prayer for special 
objects or persons, are rich in blessing. 


Would you advise a young man who wishes to 
become a rural pastor but who knows only the 
city life to take a course in some agricultural 


school ? 


By no means. It is a much advertised 
supererogation. You would spend two or three 
years studying scientific agriculture which as 


240 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


yet few farmers either know or apply; but in 
that time you could hardly fit yourself to teach 
him in his own lifelong work. If you could, 
he would not welcome city-bred youthful in- 
struction. Agricultural Extension courses were 
brought to the town hall in Plainfield, Vermont. 
An old farmer, laughing with infinite amuse- 
ment, said on the street corner: ““There’s a 
young fellow up at the hall trying to tell how 
to raise potatoes. Isn’t more than thirty years 
old. Pve raised potatoes all my life! Ho, 
ho, ho!’ 

What you really want is the rural point of 
view, the at-homeness with everything which 
concerns farm life as you will encounter it, 
rather than as it theoretically ought to be as a 
scientific stunt. Your great need will be at 
the very point where the agricultural schools 
are themselves at their weakest. Go out on 
some farm in the spring before planting time 
and stay until harvest. Select some locality 
where no false pride will follow you, and hire 
out. Trusty farm help is now hard to find 
and you will easily get a job. Live intimately 
in the farmer’s family, work for him with your 
hands, earn his money, let him teach you, 
don’t try to “uplift”? him, and in one season 
you will gain besides your wages more than 
schools can give you in ten years. You will 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 241 


have some hardships, but they will teach you 
the very things you ought to know at first 
hand. 

Your purpose with the farmers of your 
parish will be sympathetic and spiritual. You 
are not to teach farmers how to farm any 
more than to teach the physician how to 
physic. The more you can get the farmer to 
teach you the better he will love you; only you 
must go to the community with enough of the 
farm point of view to avoid city greennesses. 
They joke at country greenhorns, but our sum- 
mer visitors from the city still ask us: (1) If 
the way to unharness a horse is not to un- 
buckle all the buckles. (2) If it wouldn’t be 
better to tap the maple sugar trees in October 
so as not to plod in the snow to gather the 
sap; and (3) if the farmers do not make a 
mistake in cutting the hay in July instead of 
in the last of September by which time it 
presumably would have grown much taller, 
thus affording a much greater body of fodder. 
These yarns are not fiction. 

So far as formal schooling is concerned, our 
one great need is a first-class theological sem- 
inary with the best instruction the world can 
furnish, but located far out in the open coun- 
try where every ideal and point of contact is 
strictly rural. 


942 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Are Hebrew and Greek of any use un the coun- 
try ministry ? 

They are not of very much direct use, any 
more than they are in the city. I do not know 
Hebrew, yet have found explanations from the 
Greek text occasionally very effective; but we 
should never forget that Hebrew and Greek 
are for the preparation of the minister rather 
than for quotation in the pulpit. The sooner 
we realize this principle in all our studies the 
more effective we shall be. In your week of 
study always give the few hours to the direct 
preparation for next Sunday’s sermon-and the 
many days to those studies which deepen and 
widen the mind without direct reference to 
any particular sermon. Make this a habit. 
You will not preach quite so well at first, but 
in a few years, half sick and with no direct 
preparation at all, you will preach better than 
you would on the same day with a week of 
study on one sermon, had you followed the 
other method. Your mental power will soon 
rush down on the congregation like Niagara 
where on the other plan it would only squirt 
and whiz around. 

I am afraid, however, that underlying this 
particular question is another which you have 
not ventured to ask, regarding the intellect or 
education of the country congregation. If 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 243 


anyone opines that it is below that of the city, 
he has revelations ahead of him. There is an 
old saying not wide of the mark: “When you 
go to the city pulpit wear your best clothes; 
when to the country, take your best sermon.” 


If the country parish is so immense, including 
ats neglected borders, how is it possible for one 
pastor to gwe ut sufficient care ? 


This question has usually followed the giv- 
ing of facts regarding the extent of the average 
rural parish. Many rural parishes which are 
not in the least conspicuous among others for 
their size have a hundred miles of road and 
a thousand people to care for. Every church 
should take its share of the adjacent territory 
which falls pastorless between parishes. My 


own, an average rural parish for the Vermont 


Conference, has two churches seven and one 
half miles apart. In the field of only one of 


these churches there are, by measure, eighty- 


one miles of road and more than twelve hun- 
dred people to whom no other church could 
minister. 

This pastoral work cannot be done by any 
pastor alone. A full year would hardly suffice 
to make a single circuit of the parish and of 
the outlying pastures which nobody claims. 
The only way possible to herd these sheep is, 


244 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


after all, the only way desirable. Let the 
pastor cover the ground often as he can, but 
let consecrated laymen also visit in the name 
of the church, going two by two, each pair 
along a separate chosen road. Let there be a 
definite purpose in each visit. When all the 
territory has thus been visited, let the visitors 
exchange roads and go again, encouraging those 
who responded to the invitation to keep on, 
and reinviting those who did not hearken. 
Thus the unshepherded people will be visited 
again and again by different members of the 
church until they will really believe the church 
cares for them. When that takes place the 
worst is past. In exchanging routes, of course 
no one must forget to encourage In some way 
the person who responds to his own particular 
urging, though from a route which he has just 
resigned to another. Since any one route will 
not be too long, it will certainly not put too 
much visiting upon any one layman. This 
answers the objection that it requires too much 
of a busy man’s time. Nor wiil exchanging 
roads greatly multiply the work of any one 
person, though it does bring a total of so many 
members out over each road that the people 
at length are convinced that the church means 
business. It enlists the energies of all the 
church and means great continuous revival. 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 245 


It leaves the pastor free (aside from directing 
the whole work and making one tour of the 
whole parish—all he will find possible in a 
year) to follow up with definite help and pre- 
cision of aim the special cases which he finds, 
or which are reported to him by his visitors. 
“Pastoral work” will no longer be a lack- 
adaisical, gossipy going from house to house 
among the few who ought least to need it, 
and who ought most to help those that do 
need it. The one mighty agent of God’s 
church is pastoral work of a godly, vital, pur- 
poseful kind, but I believe with all my heart 
that a great part of the so-called pastoral work 
is worse than wasted time. If pastors would 
“come alive,” quit the fol-de-rol and the folly 
and consider themselves each the God-sent 
evangelist to every man who has no other, 
would not the work of the week be Herculean? 
| It is vain to object that this lay pastoral 
visiting is a shirking onto laymen of the duties 
of the pastor. In no way is this a substitute 
for the pastor’s work or intended to give him 
leisure; it is only to make possible his cover- 
ing a larger field, hitherto neglected. The 
oversight of so many lay-pastoral tours will 
greatly increase, not diminish, his work. But 
the field will be covered in a way to vitalize 
the church which does it. It is one more step 


246 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


toward the church’s consciousness of itself as 
the reaper, not as the field. 


Do you seek to bring men to definite conversion 
mosily by special evangelistic services or other- 
wise ? 


Often by special effort, but rarely by special 
services. It is very difficult to get the uncon- 
verted to attend “revival meetings’ in rural 
churches as they used to do when such methods 
were more in vogue. This is not at all unfor- 
tunate. The usual services of the church are 
good opportunities for “‘bringing in the sheaves” 
and for giving testimony to saving faith. But 
the ingathering of souls goes on by private 
Interview and prayer during the week. Some- 
times this will result in a demand for special 
services, but in such a case the way for them 
is prepared. 

In the little country church. where I was a 
boy my student-pastor asked me on _ the 
strength of Matt. 18. 19 to pray for the con- 
version of a man past fifty years of age, openly 
a sinner who never attended church. I agreed 
with him to do so, and announced to my fa- 
ther’s family that within a year Jim W 
would be converted. They laughed at me. 
But soon Jim began to come to church. Then 
he began to talk about what we ought to do. 





QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 247 


After a little this became “‘what we are com- 
manded to do.” Then one day in haying he 
threw down his scythe and told me: “Tl fight 
it just as long as I can—but it has got to come! 
It has got to come!’? Within a month it came. 
He leaped to his feet in the little Sunday- 
night meeting and declared his surrender. He 
kept the faith to the finish. He could not 
resist the prayers which claimed the promise. 

Prayerful, earnest seeking of souls cannot 
well be resisted, whether it is the shepherding 
of little children innocent of evil or of hard- 
ened sinners. There is always power to save. 
There may be special meetings. There may 
not. But where there is failure it is because 
people do not care. They do not pray for 
folks as if they loved them. They do not act 
as if they really think it makes a great differ- 
ence. They do not seek to win them one by 
one during the week. It is hard to resist the 
influence of a heart really aching to win into 
the heavenly road a friend whom it loves. 
And deception is impossible. 


Do you stay in a rural parish from a mission- 
ary intention or have you other reasons for pre- 
ferring tt to the city ? 

I am not a missionary in the country, it is 
my home. My objections to taking a city 


248 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


parish are exactly the same as those which 
the city-bound graduates allege against the 
country. 

1. The city is too remote from the center of 
real advantages. True, it has libraries, lectures, 
operas, trading facilities, etc. There is some 
advantage in these things. We of the country 
run into the city to enjoy them occasionally, 
ourselves. Most of them we can in some 
measure have in our own rural regions. But 
a world full of them could never equal the 
privilege of living close to the glories of nature 
in the country. The finest art gallery is a 
small thing to compare with a grove of maples 
m autumn color. The privilege of hearing 
Tetrazzini is negligible when compared with 
wild song birds in the rural bushes. A theatri- 
cal of any quality is dull compared with a 
moonrise on mountains of snow. There is so 
much to inspire thought and move emotion in 
the country scenes which God made for the 
natural dwelling place of man that any normal 
man who has to leave them for the city must 
do 1t with the distinct feeling of leaving the 
larger life for the smaller. He may go at the 
call of duty, but at a supreme loss of privilege 
and advantage. I am not being playful; I 
am telling you my profoundest convictions. 
Of course God is merciful, and spares the feel- 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 249 


ings of those who must become city folk by 
letting them think they have the best of it. 
Their hearts would break: if they really knew 
how much to be pitied they are, how much 
glory and joy they have left behind them at 
the center of things in God’s open country. 

2. The city is too lonely and lacking in social 
privileges. More folks to the acre? Yes. More 
social events? Of course. That is a part of 
the reason why social privilege is lacking. I 
am so social, I love people so much that I 
could not be happy in the city. Out here in 
the country I know all my neighbors and we 
have leisure to be friendly. Very naturally 
intimacy goes to degrees which can never be 
reached in a more numerous and highly organ- 
ized society—if the latter expression is not a 
contradiction in terms. Much of our modern 
organization is the everlasting damnation of 
heart-to-heart sociability. We are rushing so 
fast and doing so much that there is no time 
to be friendly. One side of this statement I 
write out of my own highly social rural expe- 
rience; the other out of the testified loneliness 
of my city friends whose sole business is social 
work. é 

38. My third objection to living in the city 
is that the city has too litile opportunity for con- 
tact with great minds and real leadership. The 


250 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


reason is perfectly obvious. The city is the 
center of “news” and of “activities.” It is 
the place where most of the men and women 
are to be found who are “in the public eye” 
and who are shaping the “events of the day.” 
Granted. But most of these events which fill 
the newspapers are minor and ephemeral, and 
most of the public characters popularly sup- 
posed to be leaders are distinctly not more 
than third-rate beings blown into flitting prom- 
inence. Still their publicity gives them a 
seeming Importance and distracts attention 
from the really great minds of the ages, which 
we of the more undisturbed country places, 
remote from so much buzzing of insect folks, 
have a real opportunity to study and to fol- 
low. We may not profit by it, but the oppor- 
tunity is richer and the perspective better. 
In the Green Mountains I can read Emerson 
undistracted by the last fool who made a 
speech on the Common. 

4. As a minister I could not afford to go to 
the city because the latter so lacks opportunity 
for professional advancement. Of course one 
could do successful work in the city, probably 
more easily than in the country; but if one 
does so, it must usually be “for the joy of the 
working.” The city is so large and strident 
and most parishes, even large ones, are so 





QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 251 


insignificant as centers of influence that city 
ministers usually sink into comparative oblivion | 
along with multitudes of their kind. But let 
aman do a successful work as a country pastor 
and he at once comes into prominence in his 
profession; and if he does not consent to be 
pushed into urban obscurity, he has a career 
before him. It is not yet common enough for 
men of the greatest gifts to devote themselves 
to the rural ministry so that a success in the 
country pastorate could be other than con- 
spicuous in the profession. | 

So among many other reasons, I give as 
objections to the city pastorate the very same 
ones which it is usual to allege against the 
country: (1) The city is too remote from the 
center of real advantages. (2) It is too lonely 
and lacking in society. (3) It has too little 
opportunity for contact with great and real 
leadership. (4) It has too little opportunity 
for professional success. I offer these in all 
sincerity after lifelong intimacy with rural life. 
My contact with city life has not been so close, 
though a few of the cities with which I am 
personally familiar are Montpelier, Burlington, 
Dover, Portland, Boston, New York, Wash- 
ington, Chicago, Saint Paul, Saint Louis, Kan- 
sas City, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los 
Angeles, San Diego, Riverside, Des Moines, 


252 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


Funchal, Granada, Nice, Genoa, Rome, Flor- 
ence, Venice, Naples, Athens, Constantinople, 
Beirut, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Cairo—But cat- 
alogs sound like Walt Whitman. Let us quit. 


How can tt be made financially possible for a 
man of real promise to stay in the rural pas- 
torate ? 


It does not have to be “made possible”; 
it is already so. There is condescension in such 
a question. It has the tone of the old gent 
who asks, “Young man, can you support my 
daughter in the style to which she is accus- 
tomed?” I know that the rural salary is a 
point of real difficulty from which many min- 
isters turn aside, but let us be frank about it. 
We know perfectly well that a man who wishes 
to invest his life in the country can do so and 
recelve a comfortable, though not a luxurious 
support. Of course rural charges can be indi- 
cated upon which a minister’s family could not 
be supported, but these are far from repre- 
sentative. Many rural parishes which are more 
nearly representative could be named, the 
present salary of which is madequate. But the 
present salary in most cases is no indication 
of the salary which would be paid for a min- 
ister of real power whose tenure was not too 
brief. 


——— ee 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 253 


The feeling that a rural parish cannot afford 
a man of first-rate powers has not been wholly 
unfortunate, for it has diverted many unde- — 
sirable pastorates from the country church. 
Still, it is an error to say that our most emi- 
nent ministers could not live upon a rural 
salary. They could. If they do not choose to 
do so, let the fact be admitted upon that 
ground; that is another thing. There are 
luxuries to which they now are accustomed 
which might have to be sacrificed—that is not 
the point. The pioneer history of any church 
or any part of the foreign missionary field has 
stories of sacrifice a thousand times greater 
than would be required to be pastor of a rural 
church even below the average in salary, if we 
are speaking merely of temporal things. Some 
say they are not troubled for themselves but 
for their children, who must have school and 
college privileges. Perhaps they can have 
these privileges even though the parent Is a 
rural pastor; but if not, the case is not with- 
out precedent that a part of a preacher’s call 
to sacrifice should be that his family should 
share in the sacrifice. The objection boiled: 
down is, ““God knows I realize the importance 
of the rural church, and I should like nothing 
better than to give my very heart’s blood for 
it, but, of course, it is impossible, for that 


254 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


would be inconvenient.” Which having said 
the speaker dodges behind a little child for 
whom at least he might have trusted God. 
Of course this is putting the case bluntly and 
appealing ‘to the heroic, whereas it is more 
timely to appeal with the financially attractive. 
The rural church will be little benefited by 
any to whom its appeal is in that golden tone. 
I am not saying that any man should take 
the course indicated above. I am only desiring 
that if he does not choose to do so, he shall 
say that, and not say that he does not because 
he cannot. 

This is where the case should be left. As 
an incidental matter, however, neither of se- 
quence or consequence, I want to affirm that 
any man who has sufficient mental ability to 
be a desirable rural pastor, and who makes a 
rural parish his home which he loves rather 
than uses as a station in transit, will be ade- 
quately supported in the average strictly rural 
charge. Neither would he have to hurt his 
dignity by supplementing his own salary like 
Paul. Lack of incentive and lack of organ- 
ization, not lack of means or will, have been 
the causes of poor rural support. A yearly 
canvass of the constituency, complete and fol- 
lowed up in a businesslike way, will bring an 
adequate result for an adequate minister. 


ee ed ——— 


QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 255 


(Tithing would bring an overflow of re 
sources. ) | 
Many churches are now realizing that they 
must be not only individually but collectively 
honest. We rarely report a deficit on the 
pastor’s claim in the Vermont Conference now, 
though the Rev. L. Olin Sherburne, in investi- 
gations for the Conference Board of Stewards, 
found that in our history we had _ suffered 
$284,000 of deficiencies in salaries of ministers, 
taking the figures as those salaries were esti- 
mated and fixed by the local churches them- 

selves. 

If this organization does not quite measure 
up, it can be supplemented. I know a church 
of less than thirty members in the open coun- 
try whose Ladies’ Aid makes more than $300 
a year. I know another which receives $500 
a year from well-to-do business men in the city 
who take pride in the little home church. 
This opportunity is not in the least unusual. 
All country communities have sent out men 
who are making money elsewhere. These are 
usually the kind of men who will not invest 
in a useless outfit, but will take pride in fos- 
tering a good one for the sake of the old home 
town where mother sleeps under the green 
grass. The one-room rural Meadowbrook school 
in Castleton, Vermont, received $500 this last 


256 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


fall from a former pupil whom the teacher was 
alert enough to approach with her plans of 
improvement. 

I was once told that it was not fair to press 
home the claims of the rural ministry to the 
point of sacrifice because I did other things 
of public nature which gave me advantage and 
remuneration. I replied that every advantage 
I had gained came because I had stayed in the 
rural ministry in one place. I am personally 
convinced of the temporal advantage of the 
rural pastorate. When I learned it, I was 
surprised. Now I am surprised that I ever 
thought otherwise. 

The State of Vermont pays teachers in one- 
room rural schools an addition to their local 
salaries which is proportioned to the excellence 
of their qualifications. This is worth study as 
a rural home-missionary suggestion to the great 
ehurch. 

The one right way, the easy way, the way 
of glorious overfiow, the only desirable way is 
scriptural, “Bring ye all the tithes into the 
storehouse.” | 


What can be given to young people to de so 
that they can feel that they are really accomplish- 
ang something for their church ? 


This question recurred so often that I sub- 





QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 257 


mitted it to the best organizer of young people 
whom I knew, and his swiftly summarized 
answer is this: | 

“Leading meetings, furnishing programs, 
making posters, secretarial work, writing post- 
cards, meeting younger groups, personal work, 
ushering, playing instrument in orchestra, call- 
ing on shut-ins, assisting in financial canvasses, 
writing notices for papers, going on deputa- 
tion work, decorating the church, repairing 
rooms in church, cleaning rooms, taking part 
in pageants and plays, running stereopti- 
con, etc. 

The question was separately submitted to 
several young people who are efficient workers. 
Many of the points above mentioned were 
covered in the answers. These also were em- 
phasized: Seeking to interest others in the 
church individually and as friends so that they 
will feel that they personally are wanted; put- 
ting embarrassed strangers at ease through 
social fellowship; substitute teaching in the 
Sunday school—a duty which often results in 
training a permanent teacher; putting on 
dramas with sale of fancy articles between acts; 
visiting the sick; sending cards to the absent; 
seeking the drifted who have lost interest; 
determining upon constant personal attendance 
upon all services of the church. 


258 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


One young person makes a plea for each 
class to have representation on the Sunday 
School Board in the person of a pupil elected 
by the class. I found also that the following 
direct quotations were significant: 

« The lack of cooperation is the weak point, 
I think, between the young and the old. If 
the Ladies’ Aid and others only realized that 
by giving us opportunities to work with them 
they were binding us closer to our church and 
also training future workers in their own 
organizations, that weak point would not exist.” 

“Last winter from January until Easter a 
preparatory class for boys was led by a young 
man. Each Sunday afternoon was given to 
that class. On Easter Sunday when many of 
that class joined the church their leader surely 
might have felt that he had accomplished 
something for his church.” 

“A group of eight Camp Fire girls, by means 
of a Tag Day, realized enough to provide 
thirty-six Thanksgiving dinners for the poor 
or needy folks.” 

“Older girls’ classes have on several special 
Sundays taken charge of decorating the church, 
and flowers for the pulpit are supplied by 
groups or individuals. I have had the chance 
to remind folks that we obtain flowers in this 
way.” 





QUIZZING THE COUNTRY PASTOR 259 


“Publicity Committee work for a drive 
meant hundreds of turns on the mimeograph 
and a tired arm. However, it meant also some- 
thing done to help my church.” 

One church, by means of two helpers, keeps 
bulletin boards with glass doors in two most 
public places of the town as a means of dis- 
playing all sorts of varied items of pleasing 
or religious nature. These are frequently 
changed as new selections are constantly made. 

Probably most of the things which it is 
worth while to ask young people to do are 
reasonably obvious. The difficulty is to keep 
the organization productive. Training a few 
good organizers among the young people them- 
selves is necessary. 

I have known many fantastic and amusing 
things to be done for the church. One poultry 
keeper devoted to the ministerial salary the 
proceeds of all the eggs laid on Sunday. Some- 
one put a bean in the Sunday School collection. 
The superintendent said nothing but planted 
the bean, brought to the Sunday School all 
the seed produced by its descendants of the 
second year, distributed the beans and their 
history among the pupils, who after qa like 
period were to devote the crops to the cause. 
That, like greatness, was of slow growth, but 
I know a rural church interior which was com- 


260 STEEPLES AMONG THE HILLS 


pletely repaired by one summer’s growth of 
calves redeemed from the slaughter. One 
young man asked each of the farmers in the 
parish to fatten one calf for just three months, 
after which it was to be devoted, veal, hide 
and summary, to the adornment of the sanc- 
tuary. The farmers felt no burden, the calves 
enjoyed a summer’s vacation from death, and 
the church was redecorated. In its bovine 
Interior to-day the saints enjoy the results of 
this bucolic whimsicality. A “potato per 
pupil” distributed in the Sunday school, car- 
ried home and planted produced enough spuds 
in the fall to pay for new songbooks. 





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